Ureview by: Eraser
Ureview points: 28
Ureviewer since: April 2006
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Reviewed On: Wednesday July 19, 2006
Price paid: Not Indicated
| Rating: 8 | Recommends product: Yes
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Introduction
Prey is about Tommy, a native american who ends up getting abducted by aliens, together with his girlfriend, his grandfather, and a whole lot of other people. These aliens are up to no good and it's up to Tommy to save his girlfriend and grandfather and escape from the rather slimey clutches of the aliens.
The game was developed by Human Head Studios for 3DRealms. The franchise is already over a decade old but finally sees the light of day.
Graphics and Sound
Prey is powered by the Doom 3 engine, and it shows. It features a myriad of lighting effects many even more fantastic than what Doom 3 itself has shown. There's excellent artwork going on and some spectacular level design creates many of those "whoa" moments. The game features very organic looking areas which look really icky. There's slime glistening in the ligth everywhere and rather rotten looking fleshy bits aren't too uncommon either.
The game features areas which are huge. While huge is a relative term these days, with games like Far Cry, but Prey manages to make you feel tiny compared to the surrounding structures. Prey definitely is a beauty to look at and shows that the D3 engine is good at far more than rendering dark corridors.
The sound in Prey is decent. I loved the sound of sniper laser sights homing in on you. The weapons sound good and explosions have that oomph you're looking for in an explosion.
The music is excellent. Bombastic themes support the magnificently huge architectual impressions. Over at www.directsong.com you can get a taste of what the Prey music sounds like.
Gameplay
If you're looking for a revolutionary new shooter in Prey, then you could probably end up feeling ripped off. At it's heart, Prey is a simple corridor shooter in the same sense as Doom 3 and Quake 4.
Portals and Gravity
Prey only introduces a number of elements that give it a new twist. First there are the portals. Prey features a portal system which allows the player to move through a rift to end up in a completely different room, or in an otherwise unreachable area in the same room. The way this portal technology is used in the game allows for some pretty interesting puzzles.
On top of that the game features some spectacular gravity defying features. The gravitational direction can be changed in certain areas, forcing you to rethink the way you're going to get out of a room. Special gravity walkways allow you to completely defy gravity in every direction. This allows for some interesting up-side-down combat from time to time.
Even though there's much portal and gravity goodness in this game, I feel that the developer could have taken that extra step to create some slightly more challenging puzzles. All of the puzzles in the game are pretty straight forward and obvious right from the beginning.
Death Walk
Another uncommon gameplay element is the Death Walk. In most games, if you die, you have to reload the game at your last savepoint and replay the last few bits. It's a rather poor gameplay set up that's only all too common in even current day games. Prey attempts to take a new approach to dying. Instead of having to reload the game, your spirit is transported to a small floating platform where other spirits are flying around. In a limited amount of time you have to shoot as many of these spirits to regain health. Once that amount of time has passed, you're dropped back to where you were.
While this is a welcome change of pace it does make the game a tad easy, because dying isn't actually all that bad.
Spirits, Spirits, Spirits
In the game you can also change into spirit form, allowing you to see certain things that were invisible before or reach areas unreachable before. For instance, you can walk straight through forcefields.
The developer of the game could have used this very cleverly, but instead, nearly every place where spirit form is required is marked with a symbol and impassable forcefields can usually be disabled with a button not to far after the forcefield (which you can trigger in spirit form). Because of this, Spirit form didn't actually add all that much to the game. It was far too obvious what to do all the time.
Weapons
Prey features an arsenal of impressive weaponry. The design of the weapons is neat but it's a bit of a let down that most end up being your average shotgun, machinegun, chaingun and rocket launcher again.
Conclusion
Prey definitely is an excellent game. In the end it's a pretty straightforward shooter with some neat tricks up it's sleeve. I don't think that the FPS veteran should miss out on this one, it's really good. While it doesn't exactly get ahead of other games in any area, it consistently performs very well in all areas, and on average, that makes a very good game.
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| Pros: Great graphics, solid gameplay, many "whoa" moments, original use of portals and gravity. |
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