It’s pretty much undeniable that the first person shooter market is inundated with a wide disparity in the overall quality of released titles. For every Halo or Half-Life, there’s always another Devastation or Extreme Paint Brawl 4 waiting to spring up alongside it. Then you also have middle-range titles, which are fun for a good romp, but don’t offer an exceptional storyline or groundbreaking gameplay. I like to think of Prey as being somewhere above this ‘middle ground’ – granted, the gameplay doesn’t introduce any of the new crazy and wacky physics-oriented hijinx that we’ve started to expect since Dr. Freeman’s latest adventure, but the storyline and presentation is certainly damn engrossing and well worth the experience. Given the available choices currently out there, the question exists on if Prey makes for a worthwhile addition to the average gamer’s arsenal? Hefting my ever-blunt Indian Stick of Poking™ (complete with a plastic arrow-head attachment still suitably pointy after acquiring it as a ‘gift’ from the local Dollar store), I braved Prey’s multi-gigabyte install to see how Human Head Studios had wielded the Doom 3 engine to shape their intricate and very unique gameplay environment.

To begin with, Prey has actually been in development for a really long time - so long, in fact, that it effectively dropped off the radar completely not too long ago, and I considered it all but canned following it’s bumpy development process. Fortunately, it turned out this wasn’t the case at all, and the project eventually emerged into full hype-swing once again just in time for E3, with a full release following shortly thereafter. Some of the storyline and gameplay aspects have changed, but the original concept still remains after all these years: You play Tommy, a gloomy and more than a little angsty member of the Cherokee Native-American tribe. Consistently pushing away the traditions of his people, Tommy just wants to get away with the company of his bartending girlfriend, Jen. After a brief monologue (taken from an interesting first-person approach with Tommy talking to himself in a bathroom mirror about his problems), Tommy walks back out into the bar to find his grandfather, muttering about how Tommy needs to learn the “old ways” to save himself from the coming evil. Tommy of course ignores his commentary, understandably considering that as being from a senile old man. Of course, anybody even remotely familiar with Prey will know it focuses on an alien invasion / abduction scenario, so I don’t need to spoil the fantastic piece of scripting that follows shortly thereafter – what I will say however is that hearing “Don’t fear the reaper” spontaneously kick in from the music box following a brief power outage as the visitors arrived in force was quite the fantastic touch.

And this is where the game kicks into high gear. While playing through Prey, I found myself inspired with a surprising mix of emotions not commonly found in modern games these days. The early parts of the game primarily serve to introduce the player to “The Sphere”, a gigantic self-contained world where a centralized consciousness is leading the abduction process. Now if there’s one thing I’ve found the Doom 3 engine to be good at, it’s rendering disgusting, perverted, and downright shocking displays of mutilation, and Prey does not disappoint in this regard. I’m not saying that the game purposely throws disturbing imagery at you just for kicks though; everything seen in the game serves to reinforce the fact that The Sphere only exists to ‘feed’ the entity controlling it, and this is effectively done by taking humans and literally chopping them up so that their organs can be reprocessed into either raw nutrients, or as spare parts for the slaves and soldiers onboard, and these scenes invariably enticed a “what the christ is THAT?” comment out of me – I personally feel the developers did a bang-up job in creating an environment that is effectively made up of a disturbing twist between biological and technological components. Again, past games using the Doom 3 engine (including Doom 3 itself) have already done similar approaches, but I don’t feel this degrades the artistic style put forth by Prey regardless.

But moving on - much of the presentation for this occurs early on through the game, with the middle ground being more focused on intermission parts as you transfer from one section of The Sphere to another, trying to understand where the hell you are actually going. This sadly reduces the experience somewhat and translates into a lot of generic run and gun action, with some occasional plot elements and puzzles thrown in for good measure (particularly after the scene where Tommy gains his spiritual abilities, a process which is introduced quite unexpectedly). At the very least this provided me with an excellent window to learn the game’s weapons and interesting gameplay concepts in further detail. While the game still offers the expected mix of shotgun, assault rifle / sniper rifle, rocket launcher, etc, the organic/technological display of these weapons (like the assault rifle which launches a small outgrown appendage that physically affixes itself to your eye while engaging the sniper-mode alt-fire) and the mechanics used make them very interesting in action. The rocket launcher for example has an alt-fire that will drop a temporary shield in that location, blocking all projectiles (enemies will use this too against you), and the aforementioned shotgun is actually portrayed as a kind of ‘acid launcher’ with ammo stored in entire canisters – alt-fire launches the entirety of the canister, which can do massive damage if it hits. The most interesting gun however is the leech gun, in that its exact function is a variable depending on the ammo type used. You can only stock up the weapon by holding down the alt-fire to “leech” energy from specific areas – the red energy for example turns it into a simple plasma blaster, while blue energy causes it to act as a freeze ray, completely freezing enemies mid-stance and even turning them into full physics objects that you can kick down stairs or off of ledges (until the corpses decay that is – I’ll never understand why the Doom 3 engine has such an exaggerated corpse decay rate), and there are even more energy types to discover later on in the game.

One other interesting gameplay mechanic I wanted to comment on was the death system. Prey is now one of the few challenging first person shooter titles I’ve played where I’ve never actually died once, but in this case it’s due to a technicality. When Tommy “dies”, he’s actually elevated into the ‘spirit realm’. By using a spiritual bow, Tommy then has to fight for his survival by warding off an array of demons circling the area. This basically translates to “use a ballistic aiming system to try and hit as many fast-moving targets as possible to get more health back”, but once sufficiently restored, Tommy’s spirit is then sucked back into the void, and he magically re-appears in the world, none the worst for wear. I feel this mechanic works pretty well as an augmentation to the fact that Tommy can really only take a few hits before kicking the bucket, but I felt this hurt the game slightly from a plot standpoint. When I finally beat it, I was feeling like quite the bad-ass until I realized I had only won due to Tommy’s mythical ability to keep bringing himself back to life over and over again (and believe me, it was definitely abused).

No review of Prey would be complete without also making mention of the portal system. This was actually the beast that almost brought the game to its knees early on in development on account of massive technical issues, so I was most interested in seeing how far they had taken advantage of it for the final product several years later. I’ll be frank: While I can’t deny the game does a tremendous amount of weird and surreal effects using this technology to the extent never before seen in first person shooter titles, I feel the developers may have focused a little too much on showing it off in the early parts of the game that it never had a chance to truly shine for the later areas. An example would be one early scene (also accessible from the demo) where I walked into a simple-looking room, with one abnormality being a transparent box mounted on a pedestal in the middle, with a small sphere contained within. After looking closely into the box and not really seeing anything I could make sense of, I eventually saw an open portal and walked through it. What resulted were several moments of complete and utter optical disorientation as I saw this gigantic guard suddenly running up in front of me, so large that he practically obscured my entire view. It took me several seconds of thinking I was looking through some kind of oversized transmission screen when it suddenly dawned on me that I was inside the box, and that everything on the outside was still scaled normally.

Unfortunately that was the only time in the game I actually saw anything quite like it, and was disappointed concepts like this weren’t taken further (but don’t take this to mean you won’t still be surprised by some of the goofy portal-related tricks the map designers pull, just to mess with your head). Combine this with a rather unique gravity-plating system where certain panels can be shot to invert the gravity in a room (with Tommy actually throwing up if you do this enough times in the first area where this is possible) and you quickly end up with some truly creative gameplay environments – again, I just wish the possibilities inherent in these designs were milked further for the last sections of the game. Particularly it would’ve been nice to see some combat-related scenarios that took advantage of the portal system to be fighting across several plots of land at once, rather than using the system purely for navigation. There are also a number of puzzle-related possibilities too – I don’t know, surprise me!

A final key asset to the game’s singleplayer presentation is the sound. Taking into account the semi organic / cybernetic mix, the game’s sound effects are deliciously juicy to take into account the squishy, and sometimes squirmy nature of the weapons you’re using. The ambient sound effects also suit the environments quite well, though the game’s main strength (at least in my opinion) is the voice acting. Rather than taking a “Gordon Freeman” approach, the voice of Tommy can be heard continuously throughout the game reacting to the environment and scripted events as they play out (often in tandem to my own thoughts). Some players may find Tommy’s commentary to be a little annoying, but I thought it was done well enough to really aid in drawing me into the environment – my only complaint in this regard was that Tommy’s constant focus on just finding his girlfriend and going home above anything else in light of the alien invasion gave him something of a simple-minded attitude towards his situation. Ultimately, this all leads into a pretty compelling singleplayer experience as a whole, that even strongly hints towards a sequel at the end, but working against this is the fact that determined players will have little trouble beating the entire game in roughly eight ours of playing.

The game of course also offers a multiplayer experience, though it feels like something of an afterthought (understandable I suppose given the focus on single player). Multiplayer is primarily focused around deathmatch or team-deathmatch, with maps designed to take full advantage of the insanity offered by the game’s portal-based and gravity-walking environments. Combine this with the varied weapons and the “spirit walk” mode and you wind up with some very interesting and intense matches, but I was somewhat disappointed that this was really as far as multiplayer would ever aspire to be. Perhaps we will see some expanded concepts in the future to take advantage of Prey’s more unique features (as it is based on the Doom 3 engine after all). At the very least, the online play is stable and features appropriate anti-cheat support.

Prey is ultimately a game that left me with a very solid impression after I was finished playing it through. The game’s integration of the Doom 3 engine ran rock-stable and very fast the entire time on my high-end gaming rig (though the extra hoop required to get it running properly in widescreen mode is somewhat annoying – simply choosing a new aspect ratio in the menu doesn’t work, as you have to go out and adjust a configuration file too), and the vast amount of effort the game put forth to mess with my brain was well worth the experience. But with that said, the game is far from perfect, and the main elements that work against it are the length, the somewhat generic and stale pacing towards the middle-point of the campaign, and the fact that the portal system really wasn’t pushed as far as possible. You can blame titles like Half-Life 2 for that final comment, which has shown to me that things like fancy physics don’t just have to be a gimmick, but can physically contribute to the gameplay experience in a hugely positive manner – this is something I feel Prey’s portal system offers a similar potential towards, and I hope the developers come up with many new crazy ideas for future iterations of the game. But for the interim, Prey is still a worthy buy for any avid FPS gamer.