Prototypers sends the same tactical unit against itself

A real-time strategy game about stripping parts off wrecked machines and climbing walls to shove the enemy off a cliff — and about a storefront that insists on filing it as a virtual reality headset game.

Two builds of the same machine, one war

No foreign army shows up in Prototypers. The same assembly line stands on both sides of the map: the player takes command of Experimental Tactical Unit No. 02, sent to stop Unit No. 01, which has turned on its creators. It is a tug of war between sibling prototypes, not between nations — there is no mystery enemy to study, only a copy of yourself to contain.

The whole game turns on mining resources and raising troops with no wait: construction is instant, and what slows the advance is picking the right mix for whichever enemy is in front of you — tanks, anti-air and bombers cover one another in a rock-paper-scissors that shifts from fight to fight. Parts from destroyed units drop back onto the field as ammunition for whoever picks them up first. And the map is not flat: units climb walls and ceilings, carve a path across caves and push the enemy over ledges — the artificial intelligence pulls the same trick on the player.

Full_Row put the game out on July 12, 2022, handling development and publishing alike — no outside label to share the credit or the blame. On the store page, though, it sits among the virtual reality exclusives, a label that fits badly on something built for a controller in your hands. That friction between the two ways of playing marks the studio's own update history as well.

Two years of patching between gamepad and headset

The studio's update board says nothing about discounts: it talks about repairs, and it always follows the same pattern. Virtual reality support arrived; the updates after it brought patches for the players still going without the gear — fixing desktop mode, adjusting the view, repairing an on-screen warning that would not display properly. The studio pushed the game one way and then had to scramble to keep from losing the other.

The echo of that reached the people who only wanted to play on an ordinary screen. A player with two hours logged reported, in August 2024, that the store itself insisted the virtual reality headset was required to launch the game — and that trying to start it without one hung. Getting in took a technical workaround off the official install path. It is a controller game that its own shop window pushes into a headset nobody asked for.

What wins over even the players who barely stuck around

It is barely played and barely written about on Steam, where it sells, yet the few verdicts there lean toward recommending it. Praise for Prototypers goes to the map, not the script. The climb across walls and ceilings, the enemy tumbling off the cliff, the parts that fly loose when a unit blows apart — that is what stays with players after the match, as their own accounts tell it. One write-up from January 2023, with seven hours logged, does not even mention winning: it asks for adjustment, suggesting self-driving trucks and a higher camera angle — the kind of detail only someone who keeps playing notices.

Even the most ambivalent write-up of the lot backs the visual case. A player with two hours, in August 2024 — the same one who had to work around the virtual reality requirement — calls the game good-looking and says piling up a big army is fun, while still complaining that the six or seven missions repeat the same task against different scenery. It is praise paid for with a caveat: the art convinces before the repetition wears you down.

Lose a unit here and it may be gone for good

The list of complaints runs long and specific. A player with just one hour logged describes, in July 2022, right at release, a cargo truck that never comes back once it is lost — and without it the advance stalls. Add to that an artificial intelligence that bombards without pause after spotting the player a single time, a shaky camera, towers and collectors that ought to anchor a defense but die far too fast to be worth anything, and resource parts that vanish off the map before anyone picks them up. Even so, the same report grants a concept with potential.

A player with four hours, in March 2025, points to the reason: the visuals promise more than the systems hold up, close enough to a student project to call one to mind. Real-time strategy, the write-up notes, does not demand sophisticated technology — it demands careful balance, the sort of polish missing here. A third report, from August 2022 and with no hours at all on the counter, sums up the obstacle for anyone who only wanted to work out the controls: there are no instructions on how to play, and that was enough to withhold a recommendation.

For players up for the climb, not for players after a fair fight

The tug of war between the two experimental units is for players who care more about terrain than about a power table: the satisfaction here is scaling a wall, cutting across a ceiling and shoving a pack of units toward the lip of a cliff, not winning an even match. It is for players who play with a controller in hand, as the studio itself recommends, and who accept that a machine once lost — the truck, the tower, the collector — stays lost: that is part of the deal, not a flaw to wave off for anyone who has already decided to stay.

It is not for players who want to learn as they play: with no instructions on how to play, the first session is trial and error against an artificial intelligence that spares no one. And it is not for anyone with only a desktop computer who would rather not negotiate with the store itself to open the game — that barrier, even after the promised repair, still turns up for players arriving from outside virtual reality. Those who get past it find a map worth the climb; those who do not never find out.