Prototype

This is the dominant complaint: 24% of all reviews and 55% of negative reviews describe technical problems or the fixes for them. Reviewers report the same failures year after year. On CPUs with more than four cores or eight threads, the game crashes when you start a new game or load a save ("the PC version of this game hates powerful modern PCs with more than 4 cores"). The resolution tops out at 1280x800 or 720p on graphics cards with more than about 2 GB of video memory. Frame rates can drop to single digits or the teens until HID-compliant devices are disabled in Device Manager ("THIS GAME RUNS AT 13 FPS ON A 3090TI"). Audio crackles, cuts out or plays sped up unless the sound output is set to 44.1 or 48 kHz ("Game audio makes everyone sound like they are on helium."). Some cutscenes freeze at the end of specific missions, and a few AMD owners report missing shadows. The workarounds reviewers pass on are setting Steam's CPU affinity to four cores, disabling hyperthreading, a community resolution DLL, and emoose's PrototypeFix mod on Nexus Mods, which one December 2023 review introduced as a new mod "that fixes ALL the issues from this bad PC port." Plenty of positive reviews come with these instructions attached.

Reviewers date an unannounced update to September 29, 2025, and it split players again. Some found that a clean install now launched without tweaks ("A vanilla, clean install worked just fine for me"), while others found that it broke the game or the mod they relied on: "Nothing quite like updating a game a decade and a half old with the specific intent on making it no longer work." Within days, reviewers were reporting that PrototypeFix got the game running again. Reviews written from November 2025 on mention technical trouble half as often as those written from 2023 up to the update (15% against 30%).

A recurring complaint about the second half is that Alex loses control of the fight. Hunters chain combos that cannot be interrupted, Super Soldiers close in and piledrive him, rocket soldiers fire homing missiles from off-screen, strike teams keep coming, and a hit can cancel the consume animation he needs to heal. "Hunters, which are a common enemy, have a chain attack that can stunlock you and delete 3/4 of your maxed out health," wrote one negative reviewer; another called it "a run away and heal simulator." There is no block or parry, and the dodge roll offers little protection. Several describe the first half as excellent before the game turns: "This game teases you with a beautiful power fantasy and then yanks it away just when it starts to get good." Some say the practical answer is to stop using powers at all, since "driving a tank and throwing cars at everything are the only practical ways of beating the game." A few also hate the stretch where Alex temporarily loses his combat powers. A minority enjoy the challenge and say the right powers and hit-and-run healing make it manageable, and several advise new players to start on Easy.

The lock-on picks a tank behind you or an object blocks away instead of the Hunter in front of you, and context buttons grab a car when you meant to grab an enemy. Alex's momentum also makes precise movement hard; one reviewer said "Alex controls like a damn truck," and another that "targeting (tab), camera (mouse) and movements (wasd) are like sworn enemies of eachother." Several of these complaints come from keyboard and mouse players, and one fix guide warns that the mouse turns jittery unless the frame rate is capped. Some recommend a controller instead, and a few say a controller works even though Steam lists the game without controller support. Even fans concede the point: "I ended up fighting with the camera," wrote one player who still recommends it.

Reviews that call the game repetitive or tedious often point to the story missions: travel across the city, kill or consume a target, infiltrate the same military bases, and defend a tank against waves of infected. "Why are we protecting tanks for freaking eternity in a game about being a biomass murder machine?" asked one player who quit at the Elizabeth Greene fight. Others mean the combat or the side events. Several also complain about sparse checkpoints in boss and defence missions, so a late failure costs a lot of time, and some say the repetition only sets in toward the end.

Where reviews judge the bosses, complaints outnumber praise more than four to one. The Elizabeth Greene fight surrounds Alex with spawning Hunters, homing projectiles and a shockwave that drains his health, and players describe circling the arena to heal before chipping off a little damage at a time. "Elizabeth Greene is the worst boss fight in my entire 25 years of playing video games," wrote one player who still recommends the game. The final fight draws a different complaint: "The actual final boss is a previous boss that has simply been recycled," with a time limit added. Even reviewers who like the combat single out the fight: "The combat still goes hard. The Elizabeth Greene boss fight sucks megaballs though."

Sales come up often, mostly from reviewers saying they bought it at a discount or telling others to wait for one. A smaller group objects to the regular price, which they put at $20, for a 2009 port that needs fixing; "its criminal that this game is $20 out of sale," wrote one player who recommends it anyway. A few negative reviewers also object that the store page gives no warning about modern hardware.

Smaller groups report saves that crash on loading (one workaround reviewers share is to start a new game, quit to the menu, then load), progress lost on reinstall because there is no Steam Cloud ("no steam cloud wich made me lose a 70% progress"), and occasional save corruption. Completionists miss the achievements the console versions had: "GIVE THIS GAME ACHIEVEMENTS," wrote one.