Prey - Xbox 360 (360) Reviews - The Armchair Empire


	Platform Xbox 360 Genre First-Person Shooter Publisher 2K Games Developer 3D Realms ESRB M (Mature) Released July 2006

- Cool gravity defying and portal gimmicks - Runs at a better clip than Quake 4

- Immensely repetitive environments - Disappointing multiplayer aspects

Review: Prey (PC) Review: Quake 4 (360) Review: Perfect Dark Zero (360) Review: Call of Duty 2 (360)
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Prey

Score: 7.5 / 10

If you put Prey next to Doom 3 or Quake 4, I’m not entirely sure if you could tell the difference. All take place in desolate sci-fi distopias, filled with glowing consoles and things that go beep. All have gruesome monsters, whose limbs occasionally fall off for extra comic effect. All are also very, very dark. Thankfully, Prey does distinguish itself with a number of gimmicks – all of which make it a bit more interesting than your average futuristic first-person shooter.

Prey puts you in the role of Tommy, a Native American rather unhappy with his living situation – he’s stuck on his tribes’ reservation with his girlfriend Jen, who refuses to leave. This is all warm and cozy compared to the aliens that come barging in and harvesting humans for whatever nefarious purposes. In between witnessing the horrific deaths of your fellow earthlings and administering your own violent brand of retribution, you’ll also be taught a bit of Native American mysticism. What this boils down to do that Tommy can create an astral projection of himself, which essentially means he can walk through certain barriers and scout ahead to future areas relatively unharmed. It’s a similar idea to Nintendo’s decent-but-flawed Geist, although it’s only used for the occasional “puzzle” here and there.

Additionally, this also leads to one of Prey’s biggest innovations – once you get the spirit walk power, you cannot, technically, die. If you run out of health, you’ll temporarily be transported to another dimension, where you can shoot at little

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monsters to restore health and spiritual power. After about thirty seconds, you’re sucked back into where you left off, ready for action. It’s a bit strange; it turns death into a mild inconvenience rather than a major obstacle to be avoided. On one hand, it does almost make the game feel too easy; on the other, it eliminates the need to

constantly quick save and quick load. If nothing else, it keeps the game from getting too frustrating.

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Prey also plays some interesting tricks with gravity. When activated, you can walk up and around on certain glowing strips, letting you defy the forces of physics. It rarely feels like you’re walking upside-down, given the perspective, but it’s a neat trick otherwise. There are also various rooms which can be rotated and flipped by hitting certain switches. (Try it a few times to watch your character throw up!) It’s cooler in concept than it is in execution, because it just ends up getting confusing, trying to find your way out and constantly flipping until you find the right configuration. All of these features have been found in 2D games for decades, and it’s a wonder that it’s taken so long for developers to implement them into an FPS.

The other big addition are “portals”, razor thin tears in the fabric to space that takes you to other rooms. This might not sound impressive, except you can see your destination before you step through it. You can crawl into a tiny box and end up in a completely different room. However, again, it’s one of those effects that wears off after the first few times you see it, and doesn’t add significantly to the gameplay.

Prey has a few other nice touches going for it. There are some cool weapons, like the acid shotgun. One of the few boss battles is cool, where you need to dismember a gigantic monster to steal his arm, which happens to have a machine gun attached to it. You’re also accompanied by the pet spirit hawk, which will not only hunt down bad guys, but also handily translate the alien text on monitors strewn about the levels. There are little space pods around that you can pilot, although the finicky controls ruin pretty much all of these segments. The sparse story segments are relatively well done, even though the plot isn’t exactly compelling, and certain devices are ripped straight out of Half-Life 2. The only complaint is that Tommy is a bit too verbose – every time there’s something crazy and disgusting, he’ll remark about how f#@#ed up it is, unnecessarily taking the words out the players mouth.

As such, Prey has a lot of things to see and do that you can’t find elsewhere, but unfortunately, the overall look makes the game feel more familiar than it should. The levels all look and feel the same, despite some occasional cool vistas of outer space. About halfway through the game, Prey grows a bit weary, and you’re just going through the motions. The intro segment is cool, especially when the Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” blasts as you’re sucked into the light, but why aren’t there more moments like that?

There’s not a whole lot beyond the single player mode. There’s no split screen multiplayer, so your only choices are Xbox Live and System Link. Unfortunately, the Live play is pretty laggy, and even the recent patches haven’t done anything to fix the problems.

Still, as tired as it may seem, Prey is a solid game. Under normal cirsumtances, the frame rate is locked at 30 FPS, which makes it feel less erratic than the 360 port of Quake 4, although it does tend to drop when crazier things are going on. With Gears of War still a few months ago, Prey has enough setpieces to make it worth checking out, even if it’s not particularly compelling overall.

- Kurt Kalata

(August 31, 2006)