Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Innovative"

Prey - developed by Human Head Studios and published by 2K - is a solid FPS which provides satisfying combat and interesting puzzles in a well-crafted vision of space and occasional alien probing.

Prey sets the player in the role of Tommy Tawodi, a Cherokee Indian who respects his heritage but wants to break free of his reservation and explore the wider world beyond, with his barmaid girlfriend, Jen. His plans are soon changed when he, Jen, and his grandfather Enisi ascend into the bowels of a massive spaceship full of aliens and atrocity.

Tommy's objective in the game is simple. He wants to rescue his girlfriend, his grandfather, and the world, if he has time. To do this, he will have to battle through armed aliens, their sheep, freaky little kids, and gravity itself. For the first three obstacles listed, Tommy is going to have to get his Gun (please excuse the bad pun, the game is littered with classic rock). These inter-dimensional weps range from Tommy's humble wrench - he's a mechanic, back on Earth - an all-round alien rifle and a rather interesting gun known as the 'Leech Gun', not a gun which fires leeches, but a weapon which drains energy from environmental sources decorating the floating alien farm. Also along for the ride are small 'Crawler Grenades', small creatures which scuttle around the ship and can be used as grenades in a tight spot.

So far, so good, no?
There is a problem. Prey's weapons are modestly ingenious - they are designed to be functional and interesting. None more so than the rifle Tommy picks up after killing his first Hunter, the ground troops of the ship. The player will find him/herself using this gun and this gun only for the duration of the game. Why not? It's capable of both sniper fire AND rapid fire. It seems a shame that Prey's developers have gone to such an effort to design genuinely different weapons only to discover that the players are only using the first alien weapon attained.

The setting of the game is a fairly claustrophobic one, instantly reminiscent of BioShock or Dead Space. The ship fuses modern alien technology with gross innards - the Mother, evidently - and fills this space with variations of enemies, each weirder than the next. Also occupying this cheery vessel are humans abducted from Earth, ready to be impaled upon large metal spikes and crushed into alien mush. The aliens are hungry. The ship is also littered with puzzles and hazards - the alien farm is not responsible for injuries attained from showering in deadly toxic acid or by changing the course of gravity.

The combat in the game is fairly solid, a decent FPS, if nothing special. The controls are pretty standard; LT to go into fine aim, RT to fire, et cetera, et cetera. Snipering is somewhat limited - a bar on your right determines the amount of times a player can scope out an enemy ahead, but the rapid fire of the rifle will do the trick just as well as a well-aimed bead. An interesting thing to note with the rifle is that it will never run out of ammo. The player simply has to wait for the creepy organism riding on the rifle to rotate the chamber and voila, ammunition is replenished. The grenades are pretty effective for clearing out or even distacting enemies attacking in packs or taking cover behind environmental objects, but are really not necessary for what is essentially an easy breeze of a game.

Also worth a mention are the various innovations Human Head has injected into the game - Prey, it must be noted, would not be the same game without mention of its various ingenious ideas. Gravity seems to be against you for the duration of the game; often which way is up seems unclear, and the sight of the floor from the view of the ceiling is truly an unnerving one, but these twists in Newton's theory provide an interesting challenge when one is dealing with the various enemies chucked at you as the player proceeds from level to level. 'Spirit Walking' is truly inspired - allowing Tommy's Cherokee spirit to walk through forcefields, scope out special bridges visible to his spirit only, scope out enemies ahead and score stealth kills on said fodder. The same could be said for the death mini-game. After Tommy's physical being finds itself in an extreme state of death, Tommy's spirit is transferred to a rock island netherworld floating somewhere in the sky. Dishonoured wraiths in the form of large, elegant birds speed by, and Tommy's spirit must knock down the birds before he is sucked back into the hole, returning to Tommy's physical form. The more red birds Tommy's spirit kills, the more health Tommy's physical being will receive. The more blue birds Tommy's spirit kills, the more health Tommy's spirit being will receive. I told you it was genius.

In conclusion, Prey is a game for the player who likes a little twist in the FPS genre. The game features a few memorable moments - being sucked out of a bar in a bathing of green light to the accompaniment of Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't Fear The Reaper' is one - and also contains some horror elements; being chased around a dark room by the ectoplasms of small children is damned scary, let me tell you. The puzzles are always genius - intriguing, not always obvious, but not impossible either. At bargain bin prices, Prey is a must buy.