Review: Prototype 2 – Colossal Mayhem DLC (360)

Last week, our review for Prototype 2 went live. In that review, we equated Prototype 2 to a movie like The Expendables. Specifically, “you didn’t watch The Expendables for the gripping romantic subplot, and you’re not going to play Prototype 2 for the tragic tale of loss and revenge. You watched The Expendables because they blew shit up, and you’ll play Prototype 2 to blow shit up.” Prototype 2 is unapologetic over the top action. With the recently released Colossal Mayhem DLC, Prototype 2 takes its crazy action and turns it up to 11.

Colossal Mayhem provides Heller with a weapon, three “Force Multiplier Powers,” and three custom skins. The upcoming Excessive Force DLC pack (due in a little under two weeks), will offer the same quantity of each category of items. In this current pack, the weapon is called a Thermobaric Boom-Stick, which resembles a giant rocket launcher. The Force Multiplier Powers are Warp Vortex, Anti Gravity Field, and Air Time. Air Time is great, in that it allows you to continually gain altitude in your glide, resulting in unlimited flight. Warp Vortex creates a force tornado at the point of impact of a thrown object, pulling in objects and enemies to cause area of effect damage. Best of them all is the Anti Gravity Field, which drastically reduces the gravity of those the player interacts with.

Want to have some real fun? Activate Anti Gravity Field and the Thermobaric Boomstick to create massive areas of reduced gravity and damage.

Finally, the skins: Heller Test Subject, Infected Heller, and Infantry Heller. Heller Test Subject and Infantry Heller are cosmetic only, and have no impact on gameplay or narrative. In the Test Subject skin, you look like you did when first captured after Mercer infected you. In the Infantry skin, you look like Army infantry, as you were during the prologue. Finally, the Infected Heller a Heller devolved by the virus. You will spend your entire time in this ugly, deformed skin growling and grunting through all of the game’s narrative and dialog, so any elements of the story that are generally revealed from Heller’s dialog will be lost.

At 400MSP/$4.99, Prototype 2’s Colossal Mayhem DLC pack is not too hard on the digital wallet. It definitely helps take the game’s action elements to an entirely new level of ass-kicking-awesome from its already incredibly high level of ass-kicking-awesome, and makes you feel like you could take on the entire world. Unfortunately, the DLC is really only effective after you’ve reached your fill of achievements, event rankings, and challenges, since enabling the force multipliers halts your progress towards those elements until you re-load a save pre-multipliers. If you’re done with the game when you’re done with the achievements/leaderboards, then the Colossal Mayhem DLC is useless for you. If you don’t care about the achievements/leaderboards and just want to blow shit up as spectacularly as possible, then this DLC is a must have.