Pure power fantasies and total guilt-free escapism is something you rarely get now that gaming has matured enough to tell stories as incredibly nuanced and introspective as The Last of Us, Gone Home or Papers, Please - but for developers Radical Entertainment they did away with all that, putting you in the shoes of an experiment-gone-wrong and simply letting you tear everything within eyesight right in half. Releasing at the same time as the brilliant (but flawed) first Infamous title, many chose to plump for the gorgeous graphics and animation of Sucker Punch's release, missing out on the unabashed teenage-dream anarchy of Prototype in the process. With Radical having worked on the excellent Hulk: Ultimate Destruction one-off, you can tell they carried forward all the sensibilities of that game's love of letting you do everything from elbow-dropping tanks to wrenching fighter jets out the sky with your bare hands. Prototype's powers extended to giving you all manner of bladed weapons and explosive attacks too, but it was in combining them with a solid stealth system, traversal that made Assassin's Creed look like a pensioner ambling down the street and that brutal limb-severing melee combat that really elevated the whole thing into 'very-shiny-underrated-gem' territory.
