Title: Prey

Date: 07.19.2006

Genre: FPS

Platform: PC

Developer: Human Head Software

Publisher: 2K Games

Prey was conceived over 10 years ago. Several development teams and delays later, it finally sees the light of day. Prey is about a Cherokee named Tommy who, along with his grandfather and girlfriend, is abducted into an alien spacecraft that is partially, well, alive. The game boasts three new features never seen before in first person shooters, portals, “wall walking”, and “spirit walking”.

Portals allow you to seamlessly move from one environment to another. These portals sometimes lead straight to an entirely new place, sometimes back in the same room – only on a wall, or ceiling. Prey does a lot of interesting things with gravity like that. In my opinion, the best gravity-related-addition is wall walking. In certain rooms in Prey there are walkways which allow you to walk on any surface you can think of despite gravity's limitations. Fighting enemies on these walkways adds a new level of gameplay (and disorientation) to the game. Finally, there is spirit walking. By pressing a single button you can leave your real body to do things that would normally be impossible. You can also fight enemies while spirit walking with a bow. Be careful though, your real body is still susceptible to damage and as soon as you get hit you are immediately sent back to reality.

The portals and everything the game did with gravity were innovative and fantastic. This is what separates Prey from an average, mediocre FPS. Overall I just really liked this feature and it kept the game fresh and unique. Another new feature in Prey prevents death all together. When you die in the game you are transported to the spirit world in which you must shoot down evil spirits. When you kill the spirits, you regain life or spirit energy, depending on the color. I thought that this "no death" idea was great - it keeps the action moving, you never get frustrated. I wish they had mixed up the death "spirit shooting gallery" though, too repetitive and there really wasn't anything to it.

The folks over at Human Head did a great job with the graphics and technical stuff - the game ran perfectly on my computer with a Radeon 800XT, a 1.8 GHz processor and 1 GB of ram, and I was running on pretty high settings at a constant 35-40fps. The music was also pretty good, nothing noteworthy but it did its job.

Alas, I must discuss the disappointments. Spirit walking wasn't implemented very well. Using the bow to kill enemies never was extremely useful and most of the time you are forced to use it in the game to hit a switch that is inaccessible to the character’s real body. With all the other original aspects in the game, you think they could have come up with some better uses for it... The game's story is lackluster and overly basic and clichéd. The enemy AI is poor, never really taking advantage of the game world’s unique setting.

Yes, Prey is short. It took me five and a half hours to complete and I don't feel as if I rushed. On the other hand, the game did not feel as if it ended prematurely and was overall a well polished game. I never felt bored or annoyed during this almost-six-hour period and it was for the most part very enjoyable. Comparable to Max Payne 2 - short, but every second is entertaining. Prey has a multiplayer mode but it doesn't add too much to the game's length or replayability. It's pretty simplistic, you can play deathmatch or team deathmatch and that's it. Walking on walls in multiplayer is pretty interesting but otherwise it just feels lackluster. It seems like it was thrown in as an afterthought, the weapons, all ripped from the single player game, really aren't balanced enough to make a decent multiplayer.

I think personally that there were some cool aspects of the game that weren't used enough. The whole "alive alien spacecraft" deal is really for looks only, it rarely factors into the gameplay. There were some cool segments in the game where you get onto spherical mini-planet objects with their own gravity fields, however they were barren and you spent under 30 minutes of gameplay on them. Considering most of the game was in metallic, Doom 3-looking hallways and rooms, you would think that the Developers could have put you in some of the more unique environments for a little longer (I only listed one of them so that I don't spoil anything). In addition, the developers could have done some cool stuff with the exoskeleton “spacecrafts” but those segments boiled down to nothing but getting to the next on foot segment - they weren't very entertaining or difficult.

However, I am not going to knock a game because of what it could have been. I'll just state that if the great ideas presented in Prey were a little more fleshed out and complete it would have been a much more significant game. Overall, factoring in the length, originality, and fun factor, my final score for Prey is an 8.4, which can be looked at in different ways. In this day and age, it would have been nice to see Prey aspire to something better than what we have. If there were one sentence to sum the whole experience up, it would be this: Prey is a short, fun, well polished FPS with tons of innovative ideas that do not quite ascend to greatness.

Prey is definitely worth playing; however I would not recommend buying Prey at the full price. Paying $50 for a short game can ruin the experience and I highly suggest finding other means to obtain it. Find it on sale, rent it (X360 version), or wait until the price drops so that you don't feel as if you were ripped off.

Game Score

8.5

Reviewed By: Contributed