A fun FPS that will satisfy for awhile, but gets old alittle too quick.
In the single player, you play as Tommy, a cheroke native american he hates the reservaton where he lives. He wants to leave with his girlfriend, Jen, but she refuses and says she is bound to the land by her heritage. Tommy's gandfather shows up and warns him of things to come, and Tommy just blows it off as crazy superstition. Soon enough, however, Tommy, his grandfather, his girlfriend, and his entire bar and taken by an alien ship and, when Tommy escapes their grasp with the aid of a mysterious stranger , it's up to him to save his girlfriends and, eventually, the world.
The story is good. It has a few interesting twists in it and you will feel a sense of satisfaction when you beat the game. The voice acting is good, although some of Tommy's lines are delivered with a sort of half-assed tone and you can hear the a difference in some of his lines that sound like they were edited together.
The gameplay is, as I said before, solid. All the weapons have a unique look to them (they are alien weapons afterall), but some don't seem to have the "kick" that you might expect. Some weapons even feel underpowered. That said, you will come to rely on and appreciate some of the weapons and their abilities.
Some other unique touches to the gameplay are spirt walk and death walk. While in spirt form, you can pass through force-fields and fire a powerful bow. However, the spirt walk is used in to much of a striaght foward fashion. It's mostly just used to pass through and shut off force-fields, though there are some more interesting sequences where you will need it. Death walk in a cool idea that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. It's nice to not have to save every few minutes since you'll just pop right back into the game 20 seconds after you die, but death walk can become really annoying, espically in the games hard mode. You will die quite often against harder foes, so you'll death walk 4 or 5 times in about 2-3 minutes, sometimes almost immediately after you respawn.
When you're done with the single-player, there is multplayer that is worth looking at. It only standard deathmatch and team deathmatch, but the level designs and use of gravity and portals make it fun, if not somewhat disorienting. A game can support up to 8 players and the action can get pretty frantic. If everyone has a good connection, the game runs really smooth and is extremely fast paced, much like Quake's multiplayer. However, should one perosn have a bad connection, there will usually be serious lag and make the game almost unplayable. I only had lag in one of the eight games I have played and hopefully a patch will come along at some point to address this probelm.
In the end, Prey is worth checking out. If multiplayer is not your thing, Prey is atleast worth a rental. Some times the gameplay may get alittle boring, but the unique ideas and promising storyline make up for it. If you do like fast paced multiplayer action, this game will definetly suit you. Just make sure you have a good connection or you are going to have a miserable time.