Living on a Cherokee Indian reservation doesn’t bode well for Tommy, are titular hero. His girlfriend Jen loves Tommy but has no desire to leave her home and her people. We pick up the situation at the bar that Jen works at as the game begins. Tommy clearly is on the losing end of his attempt to get Jen to leave with him and his Grandfather Enisi is only complicating things further by trying to get Tommy to accept his heritage.
So as we walk around the bar one of the first things you notice is that darn near everything can be played with. You can flush the toilets (whoopee!), play the video poker games, futz around with the jukebox (plays classic rock) and kick a couple of local boys asses when they start getting rude to your girl. But what’s this? A news report comes on and suddenly everything starts going all to hell. Green lights pierce the bar and Jen and Enisi begin being sucked up into the air soon followed by you.
It seems, that aliens have come for a visit and have every intention of killing off the human race. But while being transported through the spaceship with his loved ones, Tommy is granted a reprieve when what appears to be a human like creature plants a bomb and frees him from his bindings. Now Tommy, armed only with a pipe wrench and a bad attitude is desperate to find Jen and Enisi and get the hell off the alien’s spaceship.
But if that were it, then Prey would be guilty of only having a formulaic approach to the genre, fortunately, more plot devices are introduced and Tommy, who has never accepted his heritage discovers that in his Cherokee blood, the skills needed to fight the aliens are available. And only by accepting who he is, will he be able to save Jen and the world.
Now Prey does what so many FPS in the Genre fail to do. It sets the game up with a unique take on the genre. Tommy is not a super soldier (although it is discovered he was in the army) nor is he endowed with powered armor or force fields. No, Tommy’s unique abilities come from Cherokee lore, embracing mother nature and finding the inner peace in one’s self in order to awaken supernatural powers is all deeply rooted in Cherokee legend. And this abstract take on the genre propells you to want to play the game. Interesting characters, unique abilities and one hell of a kick ass adventure await anyone willing to play.
Now the folks at 3D Realms, 2K games, Humanhead studios and Venom games (that’s an awful lot of people working on one game) decided that they were really going to push the envelope in developing the look and design of the game. Moving in the direction of “Let’s make this place look as wet and disturbing as possible” coupled with a slew of “We’ll also make the rules of physics non-existant” tied up nicely with a whole bunch of “Holy crap I can’t believe I just did that” type of gameplay.
Yes, the game looks fantastic, not just fantastic because the creatures look really nasty and raw, and not fantastic because the environments are textured really well and designed to ellicit a slimy, sick feeling to them. But fantastic because the game does an incredible job of constantly surprising you with both big and little things. Half teleported school buses or planes can be seen meshed into the alien landscape, little creatures can be carried and their legs ripped off which you can throw, because when their legs are ripped off they blow up. You can turn off sidewalks that allow you to walk up walls and ceilings, and in doing so your enemies will fall to their deaths. You can spirit walk which allows you to leave your physical body and go and kill enemies that are laying in wait, or activate switches to access areas your physical body cannot. All of these things and more make the game such a breathtakingly beautiful game, yes, this is something that only a machine as powerful as the 360 (or a high end PC) could run.
Combat is just another aspect of how the game translates the visuals, often times you will find yourself fighting against aliens that are running on the wall or ceiling or even bouncing in and out through portals. You too will have to use these physics altering devices in order to combat the aliens effectively. You will also note tht as you start looking at the alien language appearing on random monitors, the language flashes into English and then back to the alien language, as if to tell you that you are begining to understand their tongue through your own powers. Even cooler still the alien hunters start taunting you in English. Don’t even get me started on what some of the Bosses look like…
The game even approaches death itself as yet another means to show off the powerful graphics and unique gameplay. For when you do die, you take the Death walk, which you in ethereal form must shoot Death Wraiths and replenish your slowly accending body as it approaches the physical world. Shooting the two different wraiths with your spirit bow replenishes both your physical health and your spiritual energy (both are used throughout the game). Red Death wraiths replenish your physical body while blue ones replenish you spirit energy. I can honestly say I have never seen anything like this in a game and was quite pleased with how it affected play.
Besides having some really kick ass graphics, Prey is a game that is tough to digest at some point. The game is rated Mature because the language used by the characters is exactly the same sort of profanity that I would be spitting out if this experience happened to me. To this I will tell you that the aliens are not very nice to us humans, you will see some truly disturbing images while playing this title including seeing people being tortured to death and then turned into hamburger before your very eyes and in a really disturnbing scene a small child being killed by impalement.
Having two small children myself I was really horrified at this visual, but continued to play because I knew what the developers were doing. By showing us these horrible events taking place, this changes Tommy from a somewhat selfish guy who only wants to get his girlfriend and leave to an alien ass-kicking savior who knows that if he doesn’t do something about these damn aliens, nobody else is going to.
It’s these really shocking things that also show us that games are getting closer and closer to movies and how they can affect us emotionally. I personally couldn’t wait to start shooting the hell out of any alien that got in my way after seeing what happened to that little boy. And now we are breaking into a territory that most games couldn’t hope to get to, the emotional territory. But then you run into that school bus that was stolen and the children’s blood all over the place, ah hell.
But seriously, don’t have anyone who can’t handle the profanity and the gore in the room while playing. I was playing the other day with my 12 and 13 year old niece and nephew and asked them if they were OK, both said they were, and my niece even said that this game was cool. To be fair, at this point only some swear words were uttered and some aliens were shot full of holes. But when we saw the machine torturing humans, I knew it was time to turn the game off. I then learned the hard way that any and all children retain everything that you don’t want them to and will repeat such things to your wife while eating dinner, sh*t!
Now I know it’s pretty safe to say now that the first person shooter genre has been widely accepted on the console systems. I like how the 360 controller feels on pretty much any game but these shooters seem to mesh like peanut butter and jelly, smooth and sweet. Using the bumper buttons toggles through the weapons and the trigger lets loose the action. Tommy jumps around with the best of them and activating the spirit walk is as simple as pressing the “Y” button.
Now I have Prey on both the PC and the 360, and I will say that I like playing it with a controller better then the keyboard and mouse. I know I’m literally speaking a cardinal sin by saying that, and a few years back I simply would have not uttered such a statement under penalty of death, but let’s face facts now people. The controller on the 360 is so tight and dialed in that you can now purchase one FOR your PC. It does make a big difference and I for one appreciate how such an item has been implemented.
Not much else I can say about how the game controls, it’s freakin awesome. Now go buy the game.
Fortunately, Prey also has a really strong score. When “Don’t fear the reaper” kicks on as the aliens initially start attacking I knew that I was going to appreciate the effort put forth by those responsible for the score. But it’s more then that, the weird little clicks that happen when you activate alien machinery. And, I’ve got to tell you, when you get the rifle early in the game, you can use the sniper function. And when you dom and then fire, the recoil makes this really cool sounding “zoot-t-t-t” kind of sound. Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I never tired of this sound and used the sniper function as often as I could whether or not the scene required it. Now as a professional reviewer, this means an awful lot to me because this is the kind thing that could become boring and repetitive, and yet it doesn’t. Don’t believe me? Well go buy the game and you will know exactly what I am talking about.
The voice work done in Prey is also done really well, I absolutley love how Enisi sounds in his words of wisdom, and his debating with Tommy gives weight to the character. Jen sounds like a Jen and even while listening to her deal with a couple of beer swilling patrons at her bar, it just sounds like how a person would sound in that situation. A slightly sexy, slightly edgy feminine voice that has a hint of playfullness in it when the situation calls for it, yet a real genuine fear when everything is put on it’s ear. If there is one weakness, even a slight as it is, it would be Tommy’s voice. Yes he sounds correct, but there seems to be a certain edge that is missing. He says some funny things, and he swears like anyone else, but the delivery seems to be missing something. It’s as if he isn’t totally surprised at some of the things that he sees, sure he says it, but the delivery isn’t always there.
I should tell you that there is this cool plot device where as you run through the alien ship, you find these listening stations picking up a radio broadcast by Art Bell (some radio talk show host). Art is trying to figure out what’s happening as callers from the greater Texas area keep calling in with stories of strange, horrifying events. I have to tell you that these little breaks in the action really keep the plotline moving and I found myself listening intently to the callers talk about bright lights and other creepy things that I don’t want to tell you so is to keep things a surprise.
But this is only one small thing, I mean the game blares out Dolby digital like nobody’s business and it sounds crystal clear. The report of weapons fire, the explosions, the strange alien sounds, the creaking of metal, these are the things that you sometimes don’t pay attention to, but in the hands of the Prey development team, it all sounds dynamic.
Prey is really a 360 title. This is the level of game development that we expect and want in our games. Now I would argue that this is the best FPS on the 360. It’s a close tie between this and Call of Duty, but we are comparing two games in the same genre that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. This is Sci-fi, and compared to Quake 4 and Perfect Dark Zero, this is the game to play if you enjoy science fistion style action games. I know, I graded both PDZ and Q4 pretty well, and if I would have known this title was to become the current gold standard for science fiction games on the 360, I would have lowered those other two games’ scores.
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