Prey Review

Yu Got Mail:

I have a lot of fondness for the original Prey. It was the review that got me the job at Gamerknight’s predecessor site, PlayDevil. 11 years on, and a failed sequel later, can Arkane pick up what Human Head left and successfully reboot the series?

Story:

Arkane waste no time in letting you know that this game has nothing in common with native American Tommy’s brush with aliens in Prey, when you’re quickly shown that this is a) the near future, and b) this is a story between the brothers Yu, Alex and Morgan. The first half-hour is particularly interesting, especially when you know what you know a few hours into the game.

It’s brilliant that on a second playthrough you can effectively deliberately ‘ruin’ the intro. In fact, choices are made throughout the game by your actions, rather than through dialogue trees. You can mercilessly cut down main characters, and the game will let you continue regardless. This choice is fantastic, but, like Mass Effect 3, the ending suffers as a result as Arkane try to glue everything back together as coherently as possible.

Gameplay:

Prey is nothing if not ambitious. It attempts to blend the alternate history universe of sci-fi and horror with gameplay inspired by Metroid, Castlevania, Deus Ex, System Shock, as well as Arkane’s own Dishonored series. So, you’ll have to explore huge areas, which only open up once certain powers have been acquired, whilst also dealing with stealth and/ or combat encounters, moral decisions and which (of 6) upgrade paths you want to focus upon. It sounds overwhelming, and it certainly can feel so at times.

And that’s despite Prey taking it’s time to really get going. The first scenes and tutorial provide a great background and thematic introduction to the game, but then the game falls flat for a good number of hours. It takes a little while before you can access any upgrade powers, and maybe nearly 6-10 before the psychic (or Typhon) powers are unlocked.

You’ll be at least a dozen hours in as a minimum before you’ll have unlocked enough abilities to hack, repair or physically access all of the areas of the station, by which you may have completed the game anyway thanks to one of the numerous side quests you’ll come across as you progress through Talos I’s devastated interiors. You will also find a number of airlocks or decompressed areas, but the zero-g sections were my least favourite sections.

I’m sure the controls and feeling are realistic, but also made me seriously motion sick. I couldn’t wait to escape from them frankly. And despite the floaty controls, many of these areas are flooded with tiny enemies which are impossible to hit, making them overly frustrating when you don’t have sufficient precision.