Released at just the right time with a summertime dearth of anything worth playing on the 360, I suspect Prey will sell rather well. And why not? – it’s one of the best looking games on the new machine so far, and even manages some originality in a genre so old and tired that it’s almost all been seen and done before.
Prey has you playing as Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic stuck on his tribe’s reservation and going nowhere. Everything gets turned upside-down one night when, along with his girlfriend and his grandfather, he’s abducted from their local bar by an alien spaceship – in true Fire In The Sky style…
Freed from his bonds aboard the Alien mother ship by an unknown saboteur, Tommy uses a combination of brute force, bizarre alien weapons, and spiritual powers from his long-forgotten birthright to try and locate and save his girlfriend. Endearingly enough although Prey is a serious, dark story, based on authentic Cherokee mythology, loyalty, sacrifice, love, responsibility and all kinds of boring guff the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and some of Tommy’s voiced reactions to the Aliens’ hackneyed reasons for being here, bizarre settings, creatures and goings on are laugh-out loud funny. A returning Earth-born radio transmission that Tommy can overhear at various times detailing other people’s various close encounters also gave me a few chuckles.
Using the Doom 3 game engine means Prey looks great, in a dark, shadowy kind of way, but also allows the developers to draw huge things at a great distance away whilst still being able to draw incredibly detailed creatures and items such as TV screens and switch panels. The 360 version doesn’t run quite as smoothly as I’d hoped, but there are never any horrendous Quake 4-style frame rate drops, and frequently some eye-catching effects to make you go “wow”…
The mother ship and deck layout are of a design you won’t have seen before, and although many features are highly reminiscent of HR Geiger’s Aliens, the way you can walk up walls and on the ceiling thanks to switchable gravity wall-walks means there are almost Escher-esque puzzles to be figured out to progress. Some sections are so designed that you even have to change the entire room’s gravity, and as such Prey had me thinking in 3D like no other game before it. Being able to enter the spirit world and walk around in an out-of-body way makes for some other brain-teasing puzzles, but I never got bogged down for long and the fact that you can’t actually die means developers Venom/Human Head clearly wanted you to see all of their game, unlike some designers who make their games too difficult or testing to the point of tedium.
The multiplayer game uses many similar settings, tricks and design elements as the story mode, and plays rapidly – if at times like a game of Quake 3 on hallucinogenic drugs. The game is very popular at the moment so there’s no shortage of games to be had, but after a session you don’t rejoin the same lobby, just get booted back to the options screen – disappointing if you had a good battle with some like-minded players. This isn’t going to drag many gamers away from Call of Duty 2 or Halo 2, and I can’t say it’s my favourite multiplayer FPS ever, but it was good fun, and certainly better than the plodding antics of Perfect Dark Zero online.
The imaginative weapons (some are literally “alive”), but strangely I didn’t find them all that satisfying to use, and most of the enemies are too easy to kill. The AI has its moments, as wounded enemies will take cover and snipe from awkward to get at spots – they’ll even try and mess you up by deactivating a wall walk that you’re on, sending you plunging to the “real” floor of the room – of course, you can do the same to them on odd occasions, and it’s a very satisfying way of dispatching an enemy. There are a couple of vehicles in the game, pods that morph around you and allow for some spaceship dog fighting and travel through some awesomely impressive locations – Prey really is a looker at times.
A slick and beautifully presented game, Prey has moments of total originality mixed with blatant reproduction, but it’s going to be hard to ignore during a summer when all else you have to choose from are poor PS2 ports and rubbish sports games.
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