You are Tommy, a Cherokee Indian who is disillusioned with his traditional roots and who wants to move away from his reservation and start a new life elsewhere, however his bartender girlfriend Jen wants to stay and raise a family there because it's the Cherokee way.
You start off muttering to yourself in the gent's washroom and wander into the saloon where you meet your grandfather Enisi and a couple of rough types propping up the bar. Jen is serving drinks. Enisi is a proper Cherokee man of the land and believes in the spirit world, which generally aggrevates you.
After a bit of 'No Tommy, you must stay on the reservation' dialogue, the two rough guys start harassing Jen. You get your hands on a wrench and casually bludgeon them to death, then something quite unexpected happens - The roof tears off, revealing a massive spaceship which then respectively abducts you, Jen and Enisi to the tune 'Don't fear the reaper', by the Blue Oyster Cult.
This is where the game really begins - you are all strapped onto panels and wheeled around parts of the spaceship before you break free and go on to find Jen and get back to Earth, accepting the true power of your heritage along the way.
The main selling point of Prey is the chance to alter gravity, use portals and enter the spirit world - but none of these are well implemented for the most part of the game which makes the whole experience a bit of a disappointment. Add to that a dull environment and irritating enemies and things start to look a bit ropey...
Prey isn't a terrible game, but it's not great either. Read on to find out why.

Buying second-hand and spending a weekend playing. You get a generous amount of Gamerscore for each level you complete, up to 40-50G in the later chapters, so if you want an easy few hundred points then this should do it.

Hmm... Well..
Um... The first part, in the bar you could have a go on a few gambling machines - Blackjack, Poker, Fruit Slots and Runeman (Pacman). I lost each game straight away which was a downer, but they actually turn up again in the spaceship to provide you with ten minutes of minor distraction apiece. You can even get an achievement for winning a certain amount of cash on a couple of them but it's kind of impossible, just like in real-life gambling machines.
The spaceships interiors look quite cool at first, they are suitably grimy and have an organic element to them, with acid tendrils, flesh pipes (ha) and weird orifices that spew vomit at your head amongst other stuff. You will realize in record time that the first few corridors and rooms you run through are pretty much all you're going to see for the entirety of the game, bar a couple of wider sections later on. Every room is quite dimly lit and there is very little interaction with anything except control panels, which you will be using a LOT.
A couple, and I mean literally two or three, of the puzzles are quite good. There are green gravity pads in certain areas which if you shoot, they change the rooms gravity so you may well end up on the ceiling. One puzzle in particular was quite smart, sticking you in a tall pipe-ridden area with numerous G-pads and eventually a portal leading out. Not bad, I thought - then I did it in about five minutes and moved on.
There's another decent puzzle later on in the game involving a big cube, but once you work out what to do it becomes extremely easy again. Bah!
You can also Wall-Walk, which are essentially thin walkways that go up walls and round ceilings, retaining gravity all the way. You will often be attacked when wall-walking and have the opportunity to shoot enemies from beneath you, whilst upside-down.
Some of the creature design is quite cool - there are beings called Mutilated Humans in some areas. These guys are humans with disgusting alien implants that just shuffle about doing menial tasks on the ship. They don't attack unless you get too close but they're a piece of piss to take down. Also, one of the organic 'health ports' (which give you health duh) are quite cool - basically just a weird wall-mounted slimy organism that breathes health on you. That's about it.
The A.I isn't too shoddy, well for the main enemies at least - the Hunters. These are your aromoured humanoid gunslingers that pretty much run the ship and can hide behind stuff or roll to evade your attacks. Pretty much everything else sticks to the old adage of the 'attack until it dies' A.I system. Just kill it before it kills you.
You get achievement points for completing each chapter, which is rather generous seeing as one chapter involved going into a cave - in the spirit world where your Grandfather ends up - and listening to three minutes of dialogue. Easiest 30G I've ever got. It might have been more actually. The later levels dish out 40G on completion, which helped put me neatly over and beyond the 10,000G mark on my Xbox account. My girlfriend just shook her head when I was celebrating this fine milestone.
I forgot to mention that the graphics are actually quite good (for a 2006 game). textures are suitably smooth, organic environment pieces are nice and disgusting and the enemies are well rendered, as are your bio-organic alien weapons, which all move and breathe in your hands. It's just a massive shame that all you'll ever see are minor variations of the same corridors and (smallish) open spaces you see from the opening chapters of the game. You occasionally get to see Earth from open parts of the spaceship but it wasn't anything too thrilling if I'm honest.
Tommy will say things from time to time and some of his comments are laughably bad which provides some well needed comic relief thoughout the game. I'm pretty sure games developers see 'unintentionally funny' as a no-no. Oh well.
The last 2 or 3 chapters of the game are the best, the game starts to open up and become interesting - then hits you with waves of the same bad guy, then reveals an irritating final boss. d'oh
Additionally, there is a shuttle thing you use at times and it's not bad at all. It controls very smoothly and can grab things with a tractor beam.

O.k, let's do this.
The whole aim of the game is to get your girlfriend back from the clutches of evil and return to Earth. You finally get to her in a later chapter in the game, escort her and her terribly programmed A.I for about two minutes to a room with another character you meet who is now dying, and then just leave her there to look after this person so you can go off and defeat the 'mother' alien. She might well die near the end too, but I've actually not quite finished Prey yet, so I'll count that as a shit surprise if it happens.
Enemies can use portals to appear at any time and attack you, and you can go through a portal if it's there - taking you to another place. The portals are supposed to become great instruments in puzzle-play but are rarely utilized in any brain-teasing manner. Like the G-pads and the Spirit-Walking, they are poorly implemented and end up merely as 'cool doors'.
Spirit Walking is another massive disappointment: Your Grandfather Enisi teaches you how to Spirit Walk early on in the game (press Y), letting you leave your body and solve puzzles and reach unreachable areas in spirit-form. Sounds good? Nah, it's total pants. In spirit mode you can go through doors blocked by forcefields and sometimes a strange ectoplasmic walkway will appear letting you go across it, mostly just to an ammo stash. You can kill enemies too using your Spirit Bow, depleting your Spirit Meter which I forgot to mention earlier. Your spirit meter can be replenished by collecting the souls of defeated enemies. About 90% of all Spirit-Walking consists of going through a barrier and switching off the forcefield power using a control panel. That's it. You use it for a small few puzzles, but it's mostly just to deactivate a barrier which, as I mentioned above, just confused me because I thought there was something I was missing as I couldn't advance, but instead of it being an actual puzzle - it was just a control panel I had missed. I sighed a lot during this game.
Also when you are killed you don't die in the traditional sense; Instead you appear in some spirit place and have to shoot numerous Wraiths (birds), red ones give you health and blue ones fill your spirit meter, until you are transported back to your human body. This means nothing is a challenge. You can die say, five times in one place and just return to kill whatever was bothering you. Plus, It's quite repetitive. Luckily it only lasts for about ten seconds each time so it's not too bad.
An example of just how mundane spirit-walking is: I came to a forcefield door, pressed Y to spirit-walk through it and in the room was a numeral control panel requiring a four digit code to switch off the door's power so I could get through. There were another two tiny rooms attached which I searched for the passcode. I couldn't find it so I went back into normal Tommy mode and looked about but it was obvious that I wouldn't find it so I spirit-walked again and spent a good ten minutes searching about in these little rooms for a clue. Eventually I noticed the passcode - written on the floor, in blood, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CONTROL PANEL. 2613 or something. The 'puzzle' parts are so base that you will assume there is something else to it - but theres not: it's that rubbish.
When it's not being far too easy, it's far too unclear about what to do in certain places which is equally annoying as the developers probably just assume that you'll get it eventually, as if this is a good method for making puzzles. Well it's not. It sucks balls and makes you feel stupid when really it's your game that's badly designed. So there.
There is one boss fight in the whole first half of the game. This boss is pretty cool to be honest, but later on you're wondering when another is going to come along. It does! You know what the boss is? It's TWO of the guy you killed earlier! This time though, they go down like a sack of spuds as you have lots of powerful guns at your disposal. meh.
There are other elements to this game too that I haven't really payed attention too - there is this 'creepy' voice in your head that plays up at times and makes the screen go blurry - I'm currently tracking a Keeper, for some reason I forgot straight away, and there is a human civilisation 'The Hidden' deep in the core of the ship, consisting of survivors that all look the same.

The whole game stinks: It's boring, unimaginative, repetitive and far too easy and you can actually notice where the developers have forgotten about certain things that should be there - Example: Early on in the game (and featured in the manual) are Vomiters and Egg-spawners which spew eggs on you. They are fairly plentiful early on, then there's none of them for quite a long time. Then just as you notice you've not seen them in a while, they are back in the next chapter. They obviously put them to the side and got carried away with something else. This is apparent with quite a number of things in the game - certain enemies - G-pads - mutilated humans - puzzles etc.
Having said all that though, it's worth playing for all the Gamerscore and it's not actually all that bad to just play, but if you know your stuff then you'll begin picking up on minor flaws and like me, you'll have a whole collection of them by the time your done.

I've not finished it yet, but I'll probably give another playthrough a miss as it's so incredibly samey throughout and also mighty dull. You unlock Cherokee mode (hard mode) after finishing a normal game, but unless you really really want the 65G for completing it on hard mode then just play something better like Bioshock instead.

Like writing a nasty review about it. Seriously. The game tries so hard to be Giger-esque and creep you out with it's space setting, but fails. There's more atmosphere in a doctors waiting room.
It reminds me so heavily of Turok: Evolution that it can be a bit distracting at times. The Hunters look and move very similarly to the dino-humanoids of Turok, plus the Native American thing and the bow and arrow... Unfortunately Turok: Evolution was also a bit crap.

Venom Games and 2K. Apparently this game was in the pipeline for about ten years prior to its development. Sorry guys, it wasn't worth the wait.

It's not the worst game out there I'm sure. It actually got alright reviews when It came out so maybe it's just a bit dated now. I've seen a a couple of 9/10 user reviews online which is a bit far though.
It's got good graphics and decent sound - it's set on a spaceship - you play a Cherokee Indian and you get to save the world.

Everything I said above is true.

GRAPHICS: 4/5
For the time it was made, these are good graphics. They just weren't used for anything but corridors and panels.
SOUND: 4/5
Can't really fault the games sounds, they're all in place and help towards at least trying to add atmosphere to the game.
PLOT: 3/5
Not incredibly awful, but not particularly elating either. I like the Cherokee interest in the story though.
SETTING: 2/5
It's a two purely because the designers have wasted a good opportunity to give us a flavour of outer-space carnage and horror, instead giving us pipes and grates and corridor after corridor. Dull.
DIFFICULTY: 2/5
It's just so easy. The only time you will get properly stuck is when you just don't notice something that's needed to progress. Plus you never die.
LENGTH: 3/5
Yep, it's a full-scale quest with plenty of chapters, all rewarding you with lovely gamerscore. You probably won't play it more than once though.
FUN RATING: 2/5
You'll no doubt want to take it all in and blast aliens, get your girl and save the Earth, but you won't have much joy doing it.
PUZZLES: 2/5
Atrocious for the most part, although you will actually come across a couple of good ones. They only take a few minutes to figure out though and you're off again.
CONTROLS: 3/5
Easy enough to get to grips with using RT for primary fire and LT for secondary. A makes you jump, X to throw one of your near-useless grenades and Y to Spirit-Walk. Nothing new, but nothing awful either.
CHARACTERS: 2/5
Not massively memorable or interesting, except Tommy and his one-liners. Even then he's a bit of a twat.
OVERALL: 3/5
If it were an out-of-ten situation, I'd give it a 5 or a 6 for at least trying to do something new, so it's a 3 despite everything I said above. Not a good 3 though.
It's a 2 for the Star-Rating system on this site however, based on the options given.

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Created Jun 14, 2010 at 9:01am • Submit your own review...