Prototype™
Skip · Action · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $19.99.
- Length
- 11h
- Value
- $1.82/hr
- Reviews
- 80% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 8 GB of storage. Windows only.
You are the Prototype, Alex Mercer, a man without memory armed with amazing shape-shifting abilities, hunting your way to the heart of the conspiracy which created you; making those responsible pay. Fast & Deadly Shape-Shifting Combat: Reconfigure your body to the situation at hand.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $3.99, set in September 2025. It has been discounted 104 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 14 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 94 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 80 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Days Gone ($39.99, scores 85) beats it on value, while it beats Prototype 2 ($39.99, scores 37).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 27 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2024 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 9 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,221 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 422 have a larger share. The typical game sits near 5 in 1,000, so the score docks it. 3 of the 27 refunded reviewers were past Valve's two-hour window when they wrote the review. Inside the two-hour refund window, 53 percent of the 2,778 reviews written there were positive, against 80 percent overall, and those are 22 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 11 hours; clearing it takes 32, which is 2.9 times the campaign.
Players
223 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
With some patching this game is playable again on high end system! I love this oldschool classic. Only thing what sucks is that you need to accept the EULA. This means the company can remove the game from your library at any time... At that moment i also want my money back...
Childhood memories, my god this game is still amazing.. I love it. WE NEED A PROTOTYPE 3 NOW
This game is THE single worst video game ive ever played. EVERY ♥♥♥ CUTSCENE is the exact same. Alex enters a room or a phone booth, says so dumb ass corny ♥♥♥♥, gets exposition dumped on, and then leaves and aura farms on top of a building. EVERY TIME. This ♥♥♥♥ was NOT playtested, I glitched out and got soft locked twice. It was so unbelievably edgy for no reason. Bro thought he was Shadow, im dead. The twist is...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Prototype™ scores 49/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/10150/prototypeThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.