Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Check your bargain bin"

Originally revealed in 1997, Prey was touted as a revolutionary shooter that brought in mind-bending portals into the game's very design. The liberal use of those portals still figures into the design of Prey, but it comes as one trick among many, including wall-walking and gravity flipping among others. All of these tricks may sound decidedly modern, but beneath all of that is a retro corridor shooter in the same vein as Doom and Quake, and it's a fabulous corridor shooter at that.

Prey manages to turn the typical corridor shooter upside down, at times literally. Not only do portals figure into the game's design, allowing you to travel to various locations that have no logical connection, as well as allowing you to shoot through them, but they even factor into solving certain environmental puzzles in the game's design. But the various innovations in Prey also include wall-walking, which is fairly self-explanatory. There are locations where you can walk up the walls and ceilings taking you to new locations and changing your center of gravity from everyone else's. There is also gravity flipping, another self-explanatory trick, which allows you to change gravity in all parts of a given area.

The other two design choices are reflected by the main character of Tommy rather than the environments. As a Cherokee warrior Tommy gains a few unique abilities that only he and his people can command. One of these abilities is called the Spirit Walk. This allows you to leave your body and use your spirit to travel to locations you cannot physically reach. This is often very handy for many of the game's puzzles. The final, unique, design decision which ultimately doesn't work too well is the lack of death in Prey. Should you lose all of your health in combat your spirit will be taken to a sort of purgatory where you can shoot wraiths for health and then be transported back to your location of death. The absence of death ultimately brings about a lack of challenge in Prey as simply running in headfirst and shooting will get you through much of the game with no problems. This does essentially guarantee that anyone will see their way through to Prey's conclusion however, though it is a shame that everyone will be forced to play through on Normal for the first playthrough.

These innovations however are not diminished in any way by Prey's old-school corridor gameplay. If anything, Prey pays homage to older corridor shooters by making them feel relevant in an era dominated by Halo and Call of Duty. Prey even begins in the typical 90's style shooter fashion with an alien abduction of Tommy, his girlfriend Jen and his grandfather Enisi. From there you'll be taken through the ship that you'll spend the majority of the game in. This ship is a grotesque piece of work as disgusting organic life grows onto the metal of the ship essentially creating a living area that you fight in. Similar ideas were explored in Quake 4, which is fitting since both games use the Doom 3 engine, but Prey sticks to the motif throughout. The great thing is that no two rooms truly are the same and this really helps the believability of the game's world. All of that comes coupled with some decent voice work and good sound effects from weapons fire.

But that's where the next surprise comes along: Prey's story matters. The tale portrayed in Prey is far from a spectacular one, it's the story of a young man trying to save his girlfriend from an alien abduction. But there are surprises and twists in the plot that ultimately tie the entire experience together. The aliens in Prey have a great reason for coming to Earth beyond the typical invasions of most games. The game's plot is never forced on you, it simply occurs as you play and it even wraps up nicely at the end making for a surprisingly well-realized experience.

However, the story, decent as it is, is not the main reason for jumping into Prey. The action in Prey constantly builds up and betters itself. The gunfights become absolutely unpredictable as you walk on walls, flip gravity and enemies arrive through various portals. And while the enemy AI is far from intelligent, it doesn't stop the action from being fun or from larger enemies from arriving to mix things up.

The weapons in Prey may essentially be considered standard shooter fare, but the designs are spectacular. The first weapon is a wrench which won't be used beyond the first few minutes of the game, but from there Tommy will find various weapons that are all organic and living in some form. In fact, two of the more powerful weapons are essentially enemy limbs that you cut off. All of these weapons squirm and drop liquid as you move and while they still fit the bill as machinegun, shotgun, minigun, rocket launcher, they still manage to look extremely unique tying in directly to the game's organic life meets metal spaceship motif. One of the more creative guns that bear mentioning is the Leech Gun. This weapon has four different types of ammunition and you can pick and choose your favorites. There's fire ammo which essentially makes it a plasma rifle. There's ice ammo which allows you to freeze enemies quickly into place. Lightning ammo turns the weapon into a rail gun and then there's the final ammunition which resembles a sort of dark matter that allows you to fire a concentrated beam of energy. The Leech Gun is the only truly unique weapon in the game while the remaining weapons fill out what's expected in a typical shooter.

Prey is a very well-designed game. The developers never went overboard with the game's design as they let you get a feel for the different tricks that can be used in the game. As you start to grasp the ideas the game adds something more into the mix and it keeps a steady pace of progression that never allows frustration to set in. Whether it is creative combat scenarios or head-scratching environmental puzzles, Prey's design cover everything. And just when you feel like you're getting the hang of the level design, Prey throws you into a vehicle and allows you to fly across open areas to learn new tricks and solve different puzzles.

The biggest problem with Prey however is that the full potential of this game was not realized. The multiplayer, which is far from active these days, is extremely limited. The campaign took me personally seven hours to complete. The game's Cherokee mysticism is never fully explored and the one chance that's given to fully explore the seven trials by the various Native tribes is cut short and never mentioned again. Realizing the potential at hand, Prey could have been more than just a great shooter; it could have been a genre-defining shooter. It's easy to see the influence that Prey has had on games like Portal, BioShock and Dead Space, but if the game itself had fully pushed the envelope in all of the ways it could have Prey would have been a masterpiece. As it stands, this is a really good game that any fan of old-school shooters should really check out.