Prey

"Another FPS with nice ideas, but not necessarily good execution..."

There are a few games which go into development hell, like some films, and don't end up coming out for ages, or never do. Prey has been in development for roughly 10 years or so, before it finally came out. Prey as we know it today has changed differently from the original, sporting the now rather dated Doom 3 engine, but some things not seen in an FPS game to date.

The story is fairly simple. You play as Native American Tommy, who lives in a small pub with his girlfriend and grand father. Tommy dreams of getting out, exploring the world and making the most of his life, unlike his girlfriend. He also rejects his origins, and doesn't believe in all the Native American stuff. One night, after a small pub fight, the pub suddenly starts to get ripped up into strange lights in the sky, a massive space ship. You must explore the space ship, to find the controller of this massive sphere space ship. There isn't much more to it really, there are some parts where you will hear people calling into a radio station on Earth to develop the story a bit more, like the phone messages in FEAR.

The basic premise of Prey is simple. You run around this big dyson sphere, shooting enemies, whilst solving gravity based puzzles. Whilst the combat is fairly average, with the guns lacking any real power and all feeling rather weak, there are some nice new features. For starters, the game features anti-gravity pads for you to walk on, which obviously go all over the place. There are also small little pads you shoot, in which gravity pulls you to the surface the light was on. The games puzzles largely depend on these and one other thing, mentioned in the next paragraph. The whole gravity system definately works though, and honestly made my head feel a little funny when I first played the game. The only other unique features of the game, are next.

Obviously, because Tommy is a Native American, he has some kind of special powers which he once rejected, but now accepts. The main one, if the fact you cannot die. Once all your health runs out, you go into the spirit walk. You simply shoot some ghosts with your bow to restore your health, and er, come back alive right where you died (unless it's in a pit or something, you just respawn at the top). This feature makes the game rather easy, which is a welcome addition for new people to the genre, but hardcore FPS players may find it a bit easy. You can also go into a spirit form, leaving your physical body behind. You can walk across invisible spider web looking bridges, indicated by a sun near by on the floor. These help you get to other places, for example, to disable a force field your physical from can't go through, but your spirit one can.

Prey does have some nice graphics, although they fell rather dated, using the Doom 3 game engine. Character models seem to look a bit dodgey to me, slightly blurry textures, but the environment looks fairly decent. Lighting is still superb though, much like in Doom 3. Ragdoll physics work well as well, not being glitch, although they are rarely used. The music is by composer Jeremy Soule, who has done some music for some other big games, like Oblivion for example. It fits in with the game rather well, and is rather quiet, but works well. Sound effects are perfectly OK.

PROS:

Nice new gravity features
Easy for the novices

CONS:

Rather easy for the hardcore
Guns just don't pack punch, neither does combat.

THE RATINGS:
Graphics: 8.0
Audio: 8.5/10
Story: 7.3/10
Game Play: 7.9/10
Life Span: 5.0/10
Difficulty: 5.0/10
Multiplayer: 7.5/10
Overall: 7.9/10

My Two Pence:

Prey isn't a particularly bad game, although it has rather old gameplay, making it fairly average. The gravity puzzles are rather easy too, along with combat, and whilst it might be good for novice FPS players, hardcore players may feel disappointed with the easy difficulty.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/28/07