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Reviewer:
Quercus
Review Date: 28/06/2006
Score: not stated
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Prey
is an FPS designed using the Doom 3 engine and there are times
when it shows. Unlike Doom 3 however it doesn't resort to
having you wandering around through darkened rooms all the
time.
The visuals are very nice and it is a nice change that the
character you play (Tommy) actually has a character and isn't
just a mute that other people talk to.
He also seems very unsettled by the events unfolding around
him - hardly surprising really.
The story seems quite neat and is engaging enough that you
quickly start caring what happens with the characters in the
game.
The feel of the game is also good, very bizarre and slightly
horrific, with mysteries presumably to be unfolded later on
in the full game.
The weapons are very organic in feel and slightly bizarre
- in keeping with the game but sometimes they don't feel meaty
enough - a bit like the biosludge gun from UT.
The enemies are equally bizarre (some serious drugs being
taken by the designers of this game).
The spirit-walking feature is a nice twist and has been very
well implemented - it looks suitably ethereal and the chanting
sounds add to the ambience.
The only feature I am not convinced about (although I have
been grateful for it in the demo) is the spirit plane restoration.
With this, once you discover your spirit powers, should you
do something stupid and fall from a great height, instead
of simply dying, your spirit appears on the spirit plane and
you are able to return back to the physical world again. A
neat feature although it does reduce the threat of death a
bit too much.
The other selling point is the way this game makes use of
gravity - not in the Half-life 2 gravity gun sense, but in
the neat addition of being able to switch the gravity in certain
rooms and to defy it by using walkways that allow you to walk
up walls and along ceilings. Potentially this would make the
multiplayer experience (deathmatch particularly) more varied.
I
played through and enjoyed the demo, but does the game grip
me enough to purchase the full product?
Not sure. Reports of it say that the story leaves a lot of
unanswered threads at the end of the full game and that it
only takes about ten hours to complete.While completion time
doesn't need to be long, unless the story is very gripping
that might leve people feeling short-changed.
