We waited almost a decade for this?!
You start off as Tommy, a Cherokee indian who wants a life outside the indian reservations. He tries (and fails) to convince his girlfriend, Jen, to leave the reservation with him, when all of a sudden, the classic alien invasion occurs. You get sucked up in a tractor beam onto the alien vessel, and try to find a way out. Unknown forces free you, and it's up to you to find your girl and save both her, and Earth in the process.
This story has been recycled so many times, it makes Castlevania's storyline look fresh. They've been doing alien invasion storylines since the original "War of the Worlds" was on the radio on that Halloween in the 1940's.
Gameplay is standard for your typical FPS, which is what this game amounts to. What the developers did to set Prey apart from the pack was to add certian portals and gravity twists around the ship, so no room is exactly the same twice, unless you're backtracking. This adds for some gameplay that could have been potentially fun, and it was for me for the first couple hours.
Another gameplay element that was added was the "spirit walk." By pressing the corresponding button, the screen turns blue, and you walk around with a bow and arrow filled with spiritual energy (the Indians are big on the spiritual stuff). The sad part is that, like so much else in the game, it could've been so much more. All the spirit walk amounts to, though, is puzzle-solving and walking through force fields. This idea I liked the most, but it wasn't expanded on enough.
On the topic of spiritual stuff, there's one more gameplay element that brings the whole game down: the Death Walk. What happens is that when you die, after you get the Death Walk ability, you go to this realm in spirit form, and you shoot red and blue colored demons. When you get sucked back into the hole in the middle, you go back to exactly the same place you were before you died, unless you died falling off a cliff, then you start on the edge of it. This little element is one of the worst ideas I think I have ever seen in a video game. The Death Walk takes all the challenge out of an already easy game, and, while I don't know about everybody else, I like to have some challenge in my games.
Graphics don't make good use of the Xbox 360's power. I don't know about other people, but I think I saw these environments before on the original Xbox. The environments, while gross and creepy, are a minimal upgrade from the original Xbox.
Where most Xbox games shine is online, and this one is also disappointing. There can be major lag problems with the engine, and it's just not any different from Halo or Perfect Dark Zero. The game is also WAY too easy. You can beat it in a day with no problems. A lot can be said for longevity, and this game has none.
Only die-hard FPS fans need apply to this game. It's just too cookie-cutter and recycled from some of the same gameplay elements. Sometimes, it even tries to be Halo. I knew Halo. I played Halo. You, sir, are no Halo.
A 2 out of 5.