Published by: 2K Games
Developed by: Human Head Studios / 3D Realms
Genre: First-Person Shooter

After ten years of development, and five years of proper development at Human Head, Prey is finally out. This sci-fi FPS game is implementing radical new changes that will impress, but was it really worth the wait?

Story

You play Tommy, a Cherokee, living on a Native American reservation. He is clearly sick and tired of the way things are going. One night, aliens abduct everyone at his girlfriend’s bar. By entire bar, I mean every last bit of it down to the non-impressive lineup at the jukebox. These aliens depend upon protein to survive, and humans are a good source of nutrition for these extra terrestrial invaders.

After a little scene introducing to the alien race, Tommy makes his escape from the clutches of the aliens. Of course, his girlfriend does not, leaving you to "save the damsel in distress.”

A short while into the game it becomes obvious that the aliens in question serve some sort of entity that is only refer ed to as “Mother” and you'll interact more with “her” later in the game.

Gameplay

From the very start of the game, it's quite obvious what Human Head is trying to do with the game. They're trying to redefine a couple of elements in the FPS genre, whilst still keeping true to the elements that you know and love. You start off in the aforementioned bar, where you get abducted by a shiny green light. I remember clearly coming into the ship in a kind of awe. The first couple of minutes of the abduction, you spend on track, ala the Half Life 1 intro, but not as long. This way of introducing you to your new hosts works really well because it quickly establishes that these aliens are not here to stick probes up any of your secret places. They're here because they want to eat you. After this, the gameplay is pretty straight forward. You get a weapon or two, solve some puzzles or two, and then get another weapon, solve another puzzle, get another weapon, an occasional story event, and then the odd mindless alien henchman or two, with the corresponding walking on walls and the occasional portal. Though, it has to be added, during the latter part of the game you'll spend an obscene amount of playing time just solving puzzles, so it basically shifts from around a 50-50 to a 30-70% sort of balance. I really think steps could have been taken to balance out the latter part of the game, but this doesn't slow things down too much.

Speaking of puzzles, they mainly consist of leaving your body using the “Spirit Walk” feature or turning the gravity around so that you can reach the exit. During this, an alien or two might come along to try to impede you, but all in all, you shouldn't have too much trouble, at least not on the standard difficulty level. Speaking of aliens, there are very few varieties. Too few in my opinion; you'll end up seeing a lot of the same types over and over, but this doesn't really bother me too much as the AI isn't really bright either, so it's just the standard run and gun cannon fodder scenario we're looking at. Weaponswise you've got six different babies of destruction to fire away with, but these are all pretty generic and can be put down to the following stereotypes: assault rifle (with a scope), grenades and a sort of lightning/rail/plasma gun, nailgun/grenadelauncher, shotgun and a rocketlauncher that doubles as sort of a personal shield. Note the fact that a lot of the weapons are combinations which makes for a fun innovation. Speaking of fun innovation, I very much like this game's take on dying. You cannot die in this game. Or, you can die, but instead of having to load, you appear on sort of a battleground where you have to shoot huge bird like creatures that either give you more health or more spirit power based on their color, and this affects how you end up when you get back into the real world. Awesome way of making the game more bearable, and a feature I quickly learned to appreciate.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is lacking. With only team deathmatch and deathmatch to go around, you will not be spending as much time playing online as you would have hoped. The multiplayer is basically a mix up of all the cool special features that Prey has to offer, including spiritwalking, portals and the reverse gravity. This makes for a lot of confusing, but extremely fun multiplayer action. The multiplayer maps keep up the same excellent design and they are fashioned in a way that in some weird way, a game of multiplayer is never the same, something weird always seem to happen. The weapons are nicely balanced, at least for the moment, which is something we all can appreciate. The server browser is average, it gets the job done. However, it felt like I consistantly got more servers using the X-Fire server browser. Playing the multiplayer was an awesome experience front to back, because as I said, you never really know what's coming. You might be walking down a hallway to suddenly find someone walking on the roof above you, add to that the rather weird alien weapons, the spirit walking and you've got yourself quite a fun experience. I had no registration or any huge netcode issues, which is also a plus with any game with multiplayer in it.


Graphics

The game runs on the Doom 3 engine with all the bells and whistles. I have to give three cheers to the art department, I very much liked the art design of the game. The ship is very well drawn out, and has a very unique style that I can really appreciate. It is a very nice blend between high tech design and a living breathing organism. The graphics are not revolutionary, but it is not exactly dull and boring either. Excellent work has been done to optimize the engine and it ran very well on the computer I tested it on.


Conclusion

I was not impressed at all by this game. Playing this game, you'll feel déjà vu, from pretty much every other FPS you've ever played. It is a sad thing to say average and generic so many times during a review, but that is truly what this game is, average and generic. What saves Prey from being a bad game, are the few changes and tweaks it does to the formula. The portals and gravity aspects, along with the spirit walking add to what otherwise would have been a dull experience. Other than that, the story is not exciting and the gameplay is not amazing either.