Prey

"An Otherwise Great Shooter Hurt by Being too Easy and too Short."

The given score isn't an average. Often times the whole is greater than any one of its parts. If you want a quick summary go ahead and read the quick take away. If you want a more in-depth review, keep reading!

Quick Take Away-- 6-- for genre fans only
Prey is a very solid and entertaining shooter with a great design that is very inspired (by Quake 4). Unfortunately, Prey is so inspired that the inspiration seems to run out after about 7 hours of gameplay, where it then promptly ends. The game suffers from two main problems, which depress the score-- it isn't very long, and the soul walk mechanic makes it easy enough that you don't really have to try, which is a shame, because Prey is in such a competitive genre that it becomes hard to reccomend. By just letting the character die Prey could've extended its life and gotten a better score.

Still Reading? Great! Let's put Prey under the microscope.

Gameplay/Controls--7
Objectively speaking, Prey is a very good shooter with two fantastic level design conceits-- gravity walking and portals. The aiming is very smooth. The guns in Prey look very cool, but are very standard, you have your assault rifle, grenade launcher and so forth, but all of the weapons have enough ammo and are functional enough that you will be able to use the gun you are most comfortable with for most of the game, which is nice. What seperates Prey from other shooters are it's gravity walking and portal features, both of which are put to often interesting uses during the game (all 7 hours of it). Gravity walking allows Tommy (the main character) to walk on the walls, ceilings and tubes of certain floors, sometimes you will use it like you would any other pathway, from one point to another, but frequently, you will get into vertigo-inducing battles, shooting at people above you, below you and on axis difficult to describe with about diagrams, and Prey does this frequently enough for it to be legitimately cool. The firefights are good. While you may not mow-down whole mobs of people you get to fight a healthy amount of enemies, who are bright enough to avoid being moving targets. Seasoned fans should note the game never becomes truly difficult (even without the soul- walk feature). The portal feature is Prey's next stand-out feature. While portals are used as doors, and they are just doors, the first hour or so of the game hides the portals in such strange places you can't help but be impressed that the mechanic is being used so well. You'll be looking at boxes and in all sorts of nooks and crannies for the next portal. As the game progresses, it becomes somewhat more straight forward, and there are never really too many portal puzzles or anything. However, there are some interesting moments where the portals affect shooting. You can only see portals from one side, but you can always here a distinct "portal hum," there are a couple of times when you will be able to move throughout larger areas via portals and surprise (and be surprised by) enemies, which helps further seperate Prey from other shooters. There are a couple of vehicle sequences which don't feel tacked on, but fall short of inspiring. The vehicles you will use will be spaceships, and during the handful of dogfights you will encounter, the controls are floaty enough that they never become truly exciting. They don't hurt though.

Story/Presentation--7
In Prey, you follow Tommy (you are Tommy) a Native-American who wants to leave his reservation and take his girl-friend with him. This is important because throughout the course of Prey, Tommy will deal with three things-- saving the world after aliens launch a global invasion, saving his girlfriend, and coming to grips with his heritage, which of course includes magic powers. Each event is dealt with throughout the course of the game, and while they are dealt with enough that they aren't tacked on or left as hanging threads, each event feels like it should've been treated more thoroughly, as Tommy becomes a fairly interesting character who obviously has conflicted motivations. The ending is somewhat confusing, but certainly complete. Aside from most shooters not having really fleshed out stories, Prey gets the score it did for a story that is clearly integral to the game, not just a way of putting more enemies in your cross-hairs.
Be on the look out for cool touches such as radios playing talk shows relevant to the story littered around the space-ship (the aliens literally sucked whole places up), and even pieces of your old bar. The art design is creative, even if it is heavily reminiscent of Quake 4 only, organic where Quake is techno.

Playtime/Replayability-- 4
Just as Prey has two great conceits, it has two flaws that hurt it. The game is very short, and very easy. As inspired as Prey is, and as solid as Prey is, it lasts only about 7 hours, even after factoring in the time it takes to get lost, soul-walk, and solve puzzles. I won't factor in price too much into this review because prices change, but at full price (50 to 60 dollars), Prey's length seems inexcusable, especially since 6 to 7 hours isn't a speed run or anything of the sort. Prey's short length seems to also be a symptom of Prey's ease, which is largely due to the soul-walk gameplay mechanic. The soul-walk occurs when you die, basically, you are placed in this large circle and can shoot red and blue winged creatures that buzz past you while you are being sucked into a portal that teleports you back to (roughly) where you died. At first it seems cool, you may think it saves you from excessive backtracking or reloading the same save, but eventually it teaches you not care about how you approach enemy encounters. There are a few puzzles that utilize soul-walking, but the mechanic should've been cut-- if it were, the game's longevity would've been extended.
Prey has solid multiplayer if you can find some Xbox live games, but the score is low because the single-player length is inexcusable.

Final Recommendation--
Part of me wants to say that even at six hours, Prey is worth owning because it is a fun game that is actually better than many of its peers, thanks to great level design-- because it is. The other part of me, the part that reviewing the game, has to drop the hammer on Prey and say that it is way too short to recommend buying at any price above say, 30 dollars, and even then you should have Xbox Live if you buy it. I hate to recommend a game with so many reservations, but Prey is that type of game. As Prey's price gets cheaper, it certainly gets better and better. Anywhere near full price, stay away.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/07