In an effort to find new, inventive ways to lower the bar of acceptable quality for an entire industry, budget publisher ValuSoft has now started producing substandard retreads of games that were value-priced budget titles to begin with. The anomalously excellent Serious Sam aside, budget products have always been feature-poor, ugly, and simple when compared with their full-priced competition. But at least they were less expensive. Primal Prey is a dinosaur-hunting game clearly inspired by Wizardworks' Carnivores series. In the budget tradition, it's not as good as Carnivores. But in what amounts to a transgression of the one sacred law of budget publishing, it's also no cheaper.
Following the structure put in place by Carnivores, Primal Prey sets you on a series of dinosaur-hunting missions whose successful completion earns you money with which you can buy better weapons and equipment. The 10 weapons are split between guns that stun, guns that kill, and guns that do a little of both. There's also a shrink ray that will slowly reduce any dino to about the size and ferocity of an airplane pillow. It turns Primal Prey into a kind of Dig Dug in reverse, and it's the game's one original idea. In fact, earning enough money to afford the shrink ray is the main incentive to keep playing for more than 10 minutes.
Nine prey species are included, from the standard raptor and T-rex to less typical dinosaurs such as the flying quetzalcoatlus and the lambeosaurus. Each species is most susceptible to a particular weapon. For instance, a shotgun blast will simply enrage a utahraptor, while a hit from the tranquilizer pistol will send it running. The artificial intelligence of the dinosaurs results in some strange behavior, however. It's not uncommon to see a styracosaurus--a land-based herbivore--submerged and calmly walking along the bottom of a pond.
Each species has a unique call, set of footprints, and movement pattern, all of which should add to the "tracking" part of hunting. Unfortunately, the game's maps are all pretty small; it takes less than a minute and a half to walk from one side to another. While you could theoretically use some environmental tactics to track your prey, the size of the maps makes it generally easier just to wander around in a circle.
Worse yet, the word "maps" is being used euphemistically to mean "map." Primal Prey's 24 missions all take place on one map. The time of day changes, but everything else remains the same. To put things in perspective, Ice Age, the latest installment of the Carnivores series, includes five different environments. If this trend continues, it won't be long until ValuSoft releases a game with zero maps.
Primal Prey doesn't live up to the graphical standard set by Carnivores, either. It uses what might be the foggiest graphics engine ever attempted. A blanket of fog sits roughly 20 feet in front of you at all times. Depending on when a mission takes place, the fog is purple, yellow, or blue. At night, it's black. Sometimes, the fog actually gives the game a unique visual presence--primary colored backgrounds onto which the solid outline of foreground objects is superimposed. It's a striking look, but better suited to Polish poster art than games about hunting dinosaurs.
The inability to see very far in front of you renders some of the equipment, like the sniper scope, largely pointless. For instance, the night vision goggles don't actually let you see any farther into the black soup--they simply take everything in your tiny sphere of vision and make it slightly greener.
Primal Prey doesn't look as good as the last iteration of Carnivores, nor does it feature as many dinosaurs. It does have a shrink ray, but Carnivores: Ice Age included bigfoot as a hidden monster--so you can call that one a tie. At any rate, Primal Prey is a budget version of another budget-priced game, and it's exactly as undistinguished as that makes it sound.
