About a year ago at GDC 2007 in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of seeing Radical’s (Hulk) sandbox game Prototype for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. If you are unfamiliar with the title; the story revolves around the character Alex Mercer; a “genetically mutated shape-shifter with no memory of his past.” In a sense, Mercer falls somewhere between a super hero and a villain. If you were to compare the Prototype to other sandboxes, we would say it feels more like Crackdown than Grand Theft Auto.

As you can tell from the video above, the game is about the character using his abilities to jump, run and mutate into other people. Unlike GTA, you can’t drive around inside a vehicle, but instead you run though the city using Mercer’s own two legs, which isn’t a problem considering he is incredibly fast.

When I first saw the game at GDC, I was impressed than; in fact, I had a hard time believing the game was only in the alpha stage at the time. But after seeing the video above, now I can. Graphically speaking the game looks a lot more impressive now — especially with more textures. They also seemed to up the amount of action being displayed at once — yet the frame-rate looks like it doesn’t drop, which looked to be an issue last year.