Prey

Shooter games have gotten boring. Let's face it- with great games like Half Life 2 already out and roaring, it seems like newer games that continue to come out full force just don't match up. Tom Clancy games have been getting noticeably worse. World War 2 games continue to blend into each other until Berlin looks like D-Day. Half Life mods have been slowing down to a screeching halt, and it seems like anyone who wants some good classic shooting entertainment has to dig up old CDs and just play the same thing- all over again.

But, now we have Prey. Produced by 3D Realms (When they're not doing Duke Nukem Forever) and developed by humanhead studios, no-one really knew what to make of Prey. Back at E3 only a few months ago, upon seeing Prey, I just thought “Oh, cool” and moved on- as I didn't want to see what I thought to be another ripoff of Doom or Halo. Boy, was I wrong.

Prey stars Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic living on a small Indian Reservation, who, while kicking it back in a bar run by his girlfriend, all of a sudden is sucked up by aliens, who have been abducting people all over the world. Tommy, with the familiar 3D Realms “Duke Nukem” DNA, decides that he will not let his girlfriend be killed by the freak aliens attempting to take over the world, and grabs a gun to kick some alien behind.

Sounds stereotypical- right up until now. Tommy, unable to fight the legions of aliens on his own, discovers that he has an ally- in his Cherokee heritage. By returning to the ways of old Cherokee ancestors, Tommy can call upon powers that assist him in stopping the aliens- from getting assistance via his spirit guide Talon to becoming ethereal and walking right through alien barricades. As well, Tommy discovers Alien technology never seen on earth (Or in the world of Video Gaming, either)- such as the ability to alter gravity.



This places Tommy in a very unique situation. He's not a marine, he's not a scientist, he's not a cop- he's just a guy with a wrench, and that makes things all the better. Mixing his mystic Cherokee abilities with Alien technology, he will bust through level after level with a finesse seen only in games like Half Life- making games like Doom pale in comparison. Nothing speaks to the intellectual gamer's heart like a shooter game with puzzles in every corner, and Prey delivers this like FedEx on crack.

Before I even begin the critique of this game, I will say that, much like some other phenomenal games, Prey took me by surprise. Built on a heavily modified Doom 3 engine, Prey seems to do everything that Doom 3 did not do, and so much better that one wishes that this was indeed Doom 3. When the student beats the master, that's something that needs to be noted.

So, first off, let me say that Prey is a blast. When I first turned on Prey, I got the same impression as I did when I first played the original Half Life- a kind of mysterious intrigue that drove me to keep on playing. Nothing about Prey was boring or mediocre- in fact, it kept me glued to my computer, as the story and the environment pushed the game system so well that I did not want to leave it for two seconds.

The environment, as I mentioned, is a lot of puzzles, but also is quite unique as well. Based primarily in Alien locations, Tommy blasts his way through long halls and tunnels of a huge and dark ship (Told you it was the Doom 3 engine), with many different features and functions to explore thought. For example, Prey is the very first game to feature a Portal system, which allows you to walk in small portals from one area- like rips in space/time- and appear somewhere else instantaneously.

That doesn't even to begin the features of this game. Large track-like walkways serve to reverse gravity and keep you on the path- winding like a corkscrew through the huge alien base, upside down, right side up, and always changing the user position. As well, small gravity manipulation modules scattered around the area serve to completely change the gravity- turning your ceiling into your floor, and vice versa. Not only is this really cool (And makes for some odd situations as you shoot enemies and they fly upward), but it serves another purpose- a deep and sometimes confusing puzzle system that has you use your brains to get through the long tunnels, rather than the Doom 3 standard of “Shoot a lot of stuff”.



And then there is the heavily marketed Spirit Mode. Tommy, a Cherokee Indian, can abandon his body and walk around with an ancestral Bow and Arrow- and get into places his physical body cannot. This serves a unique gameplay mechanic- not only providing two health bars for the respective Tommy renditions, but also meaning that a lot of your gameplay is spread out between ethereal Tommy and the Tommy with a machine gun and a leather jacket. This reminds me a lot of the Gamecube title “Geist”, with the complex system using the ability to pass through walls. In fact, a lot of Prey seems to reference Geist, to the point where I was slightly confused between the two- but one just has to remember that Prey features Indians vs Aliens, whereas no-one played Geist because no-one has a Gamecube.

The weaponry and overall quality of the gameplay featured in Prey actually tends to be very decent. While I lamented the lack of a familiar gun in my hands, I can say that the unique way that Prey turns alien technology into weaponry is a breath of fresh air, and looks quite cool. This is done somewhat in the same way that the Halo series did alien weaponry- easy to use and basic enough for your usual gamer to understand with little learning curve. Heath packs now come in the form of a spore-like mist, which is slightly odd, but everything else is left on it's own- which means that the very basic, the very pure form of Prey is nothing we haven't seen before, which is not that bad in this circumstance, especially with the heavy amount of unique features seen in the environment.

Other than ranting on the obvious fantasy of “Magic” possessed by Indians, there is absolutely nothing that can be said about Prey that even borders on a complaint. The game is long, complex, has a relatively enjoyable story, and has a lot of plain out shooting parts. The better parts of the Doom 3 engine are fully at work here, with phenomenal graphics and sound quality, and the ambiance is top notch as usual. While the game suffers slightly from the Anti Aliasing/Bump Mapping issues that Doom 3 had (Rather, the lack to make the models more detailed and a little less jagged), but one cannot complain with the great amount of work and detail put into Prey.



Long story short, Prey is a mixture of Half Life and Doom 3 in all the right ways. It features a very deep amount of puzzles and opens up a lot of ways to explore, as well as containing a very happy about of shooting to satiate any shooter fan. When I originally saw this game featured at E3, I was confused and somewhat bored- but I now understand why the hype was so strong about this game, and I lament not covering it further than I did. If you have a PC that can handle it, Prey is the game to play, and I thoroughly recommend picking it up as soon as possible- after all, the Multilayer server system just came out for Windows.

5 star(s) out of 5

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