GregHowley.com

This is only the second time in my life I've paid $50 for a video game. The first time was Oblivion, which was worth it. And being a video game that's actually worth $50 is a difficult feat - a feat which Prey did not achieve. I have a name for people who make it a habit to pay $50 for video games. I call them XBox 360 owners. Personally, I'm not used to it.

Prey is a run-of-the-mill first person shooter. Not a standout like Half-Life 2 or Far Cry. I'd rank it closer to Doom 3 or F.E.A.R.. I believe it actually runs off of the Doom 3 engine. There was a little in-joke at one point where the main character says "Man. So dark in here. I'm doomed."

The basic story is that you're Tommy, a native American who doesn't give a crap about his heritage. He just wants to take his girlfriend (who is built with the shoulders of a football player) and leave the reservation. But then the aliens come and ruin everything. (Those darn aliens - Don't they always ruin everything?) The one thing I found odd is that throughout the game, Tommy seems to not care at all about saving the world. He just wants to save his girlfriend. Where does he plan on taking her??

Not long after, Tommy finds himself in a dream, where he learns that he has the magical ability to spirit walk, allowing him to pass through obstacles like flames or force fields. While in this form, he can fire a spirit bow, which runs off his spirit energy. The two gauges you have in Prey are for life and spirit. And spirit is practically useless. In fact, even life isn't that useful. When you die, instead of reloading, you play a 15-second minigame where you try to shoot evil spirits to regain life and spirit, and then you come back to life. If you hear people say that the game is too easy, this is what they're talking about. The game actually isn't easy, it just that you can never really die.

The bar where Tommy's girlfriend works is pretty cool. There are a number of interactive elements. You can play three or four arcade games in the bar, and the game-within-a-game thing works beautifully. Granted, they're not very complex games, but they're cool. Even better is the jukebox, which has a good half dozen real songs, including "Barracuda" and "Cat Scratch Fever". When the aliens come, the jukebox pops into "Don't Fear the Reaper", which is very cool.

Prey's cutscenes are modeled after those in Half-Life 2, meaning that you retain first-person control while the action unfolds. This is very well done, if not original. The abduction sequence plays out very well. Unlike Half-Life, the protagonist does speak from time to time, in the same way Far Cry did it. There's even a profanity filter you can turn on and off. With it off, you can hear comments like "I hate these fucking robots!" or "What the fuck is going on?!?".

The game's weapons aren't bad, even if they're not as well done as those in Doom. You start with a big wrench, which is the token melee weapon. You soon get a hunter rifle, which is a combination sniper rifle and machine gun. The scope stays useful throughout the game. The interesting thing is that every weapon in the game has an alt fire. The hunter rifle has the sniper scope, the alien chaingun equivalent has a grenade launcher, and the rocket launcher has an odd energy shield. Also interesting is the leech gun, which has a secondary fire that leeches energy from certain ports - you can find lightning, fire, or cold ports, each of which has different uses.

The game's most interesting aspects are the gravity and portal elements. You first encounter this through walkways. You come into a room and fight enemies who are on the ceiling. Soon after, you move up a walkway and find yourself walking on the wall. It gets disorienting very quickly. Luckily, the path through the game is very linear. In addition, when you travel through a portal in this game, there's no guarantee that the gravity on the other end of the portal lines up with gravity on this end. You may walk through a portal and fall sideways onto the floor. Particularly odd was when portals lined up so that you could see yourself from the side through one. Of course, I had to shoot at myself to see what would happen. I got hurt.

There are also portions of the game with gravity switches on the wall. When shot, gravity changes, and the wall or ceiling with the switch becomes the new floor. Amusingly, Tommy gets physically sick the first time he goes through all this. I've got to say, figuring out that I was supposed to shoot that little blue place on the wall was less than intuitive, as were many of the puzzles in this game. The puzzles are way too frequent, and very annoying. After the thousandth time, I understand that I'm supposed to spirit walk through the force field and push the button to deactivate it. It gets old.

The game has the same bad physics that appear in so many first person shooters nowadays. Of course, I'm spoiled by Half-Life 2, but when I push a giant cube across the floor it shouldn't roll. It should slide.

Prey also makes limited use of vehicles. You can pilot shuttles in the game. And if you thought that the gravity puzzles were disorienting, try piloting a shuttle, where there literally is no up and down. While in a shuttle, your field of view is so small that it gets really difficult to fight. The weapons are powerful, and the shuttle has a little tractor beam which allows Prey to throw a couple more puzzles at you, but they're even less intuitive than the gravity puzzles.

Overall, Prey is a decent shooter. Nothing phenomenal, and I'd recommend not paying $50 for it, but it's got some cool gameplay moments that make it worth $35 or $40. Pick it up once the price drops a bit. And if anyone ever figures out why freaky ghost children keep attacking me, please let me know.