Before rolling your eyes at the thought of another open-world sandbox game, consider Prototype’s angle. As mysterious and often heartless shape-shifting enigma Alex Mercer, you’re a changeling thrust into the middle of a three-way present-day Manhattan war.

On one side is, of course, you. Who and what the hell are you? And why is it so fun to slam innocent pedestrians to the ground, stomp on their throats, and plunge your T-1000–esque arm into their chest cavities, absorbing their memories, knowledge, and flesh into your own body in a bloody, public display? (Well, finding the answers to those questions is part of Prototype’s allure.) On another side is the military, who have declared martial law because of the third member of the battle: a horde of mutants that have been infected by a viral epidemic spreading throughout New York City.

Clearly, Radical’s experience with The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction — one of the best superhero offerings in recent years — shines through in Prototype. The way the superhuman Mercer moves could easily be mistaken for Hulk if our hero was big and green: he runs furiously down streets, leaping from car to car, caving in their roofs with each landing, and hoofing it straight up buildings.

Seeing Mercer pull off a number of superhero-style moves in our demo, most notably when attacked by an Apache helicopter, evoked more than a few gasps from the room. After snaking between cars in traffic and baiting the chopper to get low, he leaped and latched onto the outside of the cockpit. After sliding the glass hatch open, he threw the pilot to his death below, then skittered to the backseat and eviscerated the co-pilot, commandeering the vehicle for himself, free to machine-gun the crap out of military and infected annoyances. Mercer can jack tanks just as flamboyantly.

Of course, you don’t have to take the direct, aggressive approach. In tackling the conspiracydriven plotline, you’ll have the chance to consume and shape-shift into an innocentlooking pedestrian and sneak about, or maybe assume the fleshy guise of a commanding Army officer, whose appearance you can use to fool the military into fighting for you.

All told, Designer Eric Holmes hopes Prototype will allow you to “create new ways to kick some [expletive] ass.” Adds Producer Tim Bennison: “We want to have the most gameplay per square foot that you’ve ever seen.”

More of an all-out, destruction-happy, conspiracy-tinged playground than a straight-up sandbox game, Prototype offers up a new twist on the genre Grand Theft Auto fostered. And maybe even more so than GTA IV, Radical’s new bruiser should be wearing the motto “Things will be different.”