steve kwan user experience designer

Review: Prey

(July 19th, 2006 - 12:33AM)

Natives vs Aliens.

(4 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: If you liked Quake 4, you'll like Prey.

I've been excited about Prey ever since I saw the trailer. It's a trippy first-person shooter based on the Doom 3 engine. You play as Tommy, a disgruntled Cherokee youth whose life is turned upside down when he, his girlfriend and his grandpa are abducted by aliens.

You can tell that Prey's developers were really desperate to innovate in the somewhat stale FPS genre. They've introduced a lot of neat tricks, some of which are fun, and some of which are disappointing. Here are my thoughts.

Things I liked about Prey

• You play as a Cherokee. I can't overemphasize how cool that is. I don't think I've ever seen a game with a Native protagonist. The game doesn't pull any punches; Tommy really does seem like a restless youth. The game begins with him beating up two white guys in a bar. As the game progresses, Tommy accepts his culture and becomes a better warrior for it.
• The storyline is pretty strong for an FPS. I suppose that it's not completely original, but it works well for the game and draws you in.
• The portals. If you've read about Prey, then you know what I'm talking about. You'll encounter portals that take you from one area to another. Sure, games have had portals before, but not like this. You can walk right through one portal to another seamlessly. No load times. In fact, you can even see through and shoot through portals. A very nice effect.
• The nifty spatial tricks, like walking on walls and ceilings. Trippy.
• The innovative weapons. Prey departs from the standard pistol/shotgun/SMG fare that you get in so many other games. Your weapons are definitely alien in nature. They're all distinctly different and fun to use. In some games, the weapons are all basic point-and-shoot guns, some of which are more useful than others. But in Prey, a lot of care has been taken to ensure that all the weapons have a distinct feel, and that they're all useful. There's one exception: the wrench. I'll discuss this later.
• It has some of the best level design I've seen in years. A lot of other reviews have ragged on Prey for being a corridor shooter. Don't believe it. There are certainly some corridor crawls in the game, but there's a lot of diversity.
• The voice acting is quite strong overall - but it does have some rough spots.

Things I didn't like about Prey

• It's really short. According to the Prey's game clock, I beat it in less than six hours. Episodic games like SiN: Episodes and Half-Life 2: Episode One were almost as long.
• There's some great plot advancement early in the game, some more late in the game, and the space in between is pretty much pointless.
• The logic puzzles are extremely redundant, and most can be solved using the same basic tricks.
• The Death Walk. This is probably the most controversial part of Prey. You can't die in this game, and by that I don't mean it's easy. I mean you simply cannot die. It's impossible. When you run out of health or fall off a cliff, you "Death Walk," which is reminiscient of hunting in Oregon Trail. After a few seconds of this, you're back in the game. I suppose the intent here is to acknowledge the fact that you never really die in FPS games, because you can just quick load. Still, the fact that you're invincible really makes the game feel one-sided.
• For all the fantastic spatial tricks, the combat and gameplay are a tad shallow.
• The Spirit Walk feature, which allows you to leave your body and walk to places you couldn't otherwise go, is underutilized. Also, when in Spirit Mode you're armed with a bow that I didn't find that useful.
• Your first weapon is a wrench. It's not uncommon for FPS games to provide the player with a melee weapon that they can use in case they run out of ammo. However, in Prey your first real weapon is a rifle with unlimited ammo. So why do I need the wrench?
• You spend far too much of the game flying around in an idiotic exoskeleton.