Prey

by: The Ryan July 12 2006

In Development for over 10 years, it’s finally here.

The first impression I had from Prey when playing the demo was ‘WOW’! Now I’ve played the full version and gone a little deeper into the story, which is developing very slowly.

You’re name is Tommy, a Cherokee Indian who lives on the reservation that he was born. He’s tired of his life and heritage and wants his girlfriend Jen (also Cherokee) to run away with him off the reservation. Jen is proud of her heritage and doesn’t want to leave, always persuading him to want to stay. Well, a few short minutes after Tommy and Jen have this conversation at the beginning of the game, they go farther than either of them wanted to go. The bar that Jen works at gets torn apart by some strange green lights shining through the ceiling and sucks both them and Tommy’s grandfather into an alien ship. After an entertaining scene being transported through the bowels of the alien ship where you see different types of enemies and terrains you are “rescued” from the contraption that you are strapped to. From there it is a quest to save your grandfather and girlfriend from the alien visitors.

Prey does a great job at making you feel that you aren’t very far from home. As you’re being transported on the alien ship you can see earth as you would if you were an astronaut. Several times during the game you are able to open up a window viewing the earth from many miles up.

The weapons in Prey are inventive but not inventive enough. They are all “living” weapons, for example the rifle that you have can turn into a sniper rifle. When you press the button to use the sniper scope a piece of the fun attaches to your eye to allow you to view down far corridors. If you look closely at the weapon it will start to kind of slither around when you’re not using it.

Teleporters in Prey are the most unique item in the game. They aren’t your normal teleporters in most games that just flash you to another destination. It’s more like a doorway to another room. You seamlessly walk right through the ‘hole’ that appears in mid-air to another area of the ship. You can shoot through these teleporter rings and throw gernades through them also as if they were not even there. That in itself shows the real power behind the games engine, able to render two totally different environments at the same time without any stuttering.

Early on in the game your grandfather teaches you what’s called the ‘spirit walk’, one of the benefits of being Cherokee. It’s basically a way to leave your body behind while you can control your nearly invisible spirit form around the levels. Your spirit form also comes equipped with a spiritual bow and arrow. As your spirit gets hit or uses it’s bow and arrow you lose spirit power. Once your spirit power depletes, you have no more access to the bow and arrow. As long as your human body isn’t found you can roam around in spirit form forever. If your human body dies, you actually get transported to a sort of floating rock out in the middle of nowhere as your spirit. You have about 15 seconds or so to shoot these blue and red wraiths that are flying around with your bow and arrow. The more red wraiths that you hit you get health for your human form and the more blue wraiths you hit gets you health for your spirit form.

The teleporters and the spirit form account for a good amount of the puzzle solving in Prey. Sometimes you have to change the gravity of a room (which can be very disorienting for a moment) to stand on the wall so you are able to get to the next teleporter. Or you have to go into spirit form to pass through a forcefield, but nothing too complex at all. There are also wall walking panels that can get you from place to place but it’s more of a gimmick than anythign else. I’s really the different gravity fields like when your shooting someone who’s running at you on the wall that messes with you.

All in all I liked this game a lot. It’s a good (but slow) storyline and a basic First Person Shooter. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but definitely worth a rental, a normal person can breeze through this game in about 8 hours or so.