Prototype
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.
Action AdventureHorrorOpen WorldRole-PlayingSandbox
Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.
- Released
- 2009
- Developer
- Radical Entertainment
- Platforms
- 6 systems
- Critics
- 79
- Steam Deck
- playable
- Download
- Not stated
What is Prototype?
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.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 9 June 2009 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Radical Entertainment |
| Publisher | Not recorded |
| Platforms | PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam Deck |
| Genres | Action Adventure, Horror, Open World, Role-Playing, Sandbox |
| Languages | 4 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q473852, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Prototype received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | Not stated |
| Cloud saves | No |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Single-player only |
| In-game purchases | No |
| Steam Deck | playable |
| Download size | Not stated |
| Add-on content | None listed |
| Age gate | 17+ |
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Prototype worth it?
80% of 14,163 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. It costs $19.99 on Steam, and critics score it 79/100.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Prototype? How long to beat it
Total play time for Prototype is about 31.2 hours to do everything, and around 11 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 11h | 297 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 16.5h | 245 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 31.2h | 55 |
At its current price of $19.99, beating the main story works out to about $1.82 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Prototype system requirements
The minimum requirements from Prototype's Steam page. These are what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings.
| Processor | Intel® Core™2 Duo 2.6 GHz |
|---|
Where Prototype sits on the grid
Compare the whole cataloguePrototype plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- Multi-platform
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Prototype
These are estimates, not reported figures. Radical Entertainment has not published unit sales for Prototype, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 14,163 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $19.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Radical Entertainment publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Prototype price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $19.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Prototype updates & patch notes
Pulled from Prototype's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
What readers say about Prototype
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Prototype on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Crashes and freezes60 of 300 (20%)
The game crashes and is unplayable on modern computers.
Steam review, 13 May 2025 · 1 hours played · 50 readers marked it helpfulEndlessly crashing, couldn't get the game to work, even with fixes offered online.
Steam review, 30 May 2025 · 0 hours played · 34 readers marked it helpful - Will not launch or install19 of 300 (6%)
Game doesn't run at all on modern systems.
Steam review, 6 February 2025 · 0 hours played · 50 readers marked it helpfulThe game does not start properly and mods and old drivers need to be installed.
Steam review, 28 July 2025 · 0 hours played · 24 readers marked it helpful - Performance and stutter13 of 300 (4%)
The max resolution is like 1280x800 or something, and my FPS was so bad that the rendered cinematics were lagging and had choppy audio.
Steam review, 16 January 2025 · 2 hours played · 22 readers marked it helpfulLatest update broke mods and fixes for stuff like stuttering, AA, crashes and modern monitor resolutions.
Steam review, 4 October 2025 · 43 hours played · 7 readers marked it helpful
A further 10 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Prototype appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Prototype qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Prototype
24 games overlap with Prototype on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Prototype 2, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Assassin's Creed Revelations.
Part of the Prototype series
Prototype is one of 2 Prototype games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Prototype head to head
See Prototype compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Prototype comparisons: vs The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition Deluxe (2009), vs Fallout: New Vegas, vs Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition, vs DRAGON BALL FighterZ, vs Mass Effect Legendary Edition, vs Mount & Blade: Warband, vs Yakuza 0, vs ARK: Survival Evolved, vs Dead Island Definitive Edition, vs Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, vs Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, vs Risen, vs State of Decay, vs The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, vs Torchlight II, vs Watch Dogs, vs ArcheAge, vs BioShock Remastered, vs Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition, vs Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, vs Dungeon Siege, vs ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN, vs EverQuest II, vs Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle, vs Gothic 1, vs Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, vs Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, vs Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, vs Might & Magic: Heroes VI, vs NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM 4, vs Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition, vs Postal 2, vs Remnant: From the Ashes, vs RuneScape , vs SoulWorker - Anime Action MMO, vs South Park: The Stick of Truth, vs Subnautica, vs The Evil Within 2, vs The Lord of the Rings Online, vs The Surge 2, vs Thief Gold (1999), vs Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, vs Two Worlds Epic Edition, vs Wasteland 3, vs Zombie Army Trilogy
Common questions about Prototype
What platforms is Prototype on?
Prototype is available on PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam Deck. It first released in 2009.
How much does Prototype cost?
$19.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Prototype?
80% of 14,163 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
What is the Metacritic score for Prototype?
79 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.
Does Prototype work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Prototype as playable on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.
Who made Prototype?
Prototype was developed by Radical Entertainment.
Is Prototype worth it in 2026?
80% of 14,163 Steam reviews are positive (Very Positive), and it is $19.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Prototype on sale?
Not at the moment. Prototype is at its $19.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
What are the system requirements for Prototype?
At minimum, Prototype needs a Intel® Core™2 Duo 2.6 GHz, from its Steam listing. That is what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings. Check it against your own PC on the can-I-run page.
How long does it take to beat Prototype?
about 11 hours for the main story, 16.5 hours with the main extras, 31.2 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.