Nvidia 9800GX2

Prey

Author: Lance William
Published: 19th July 2006
Comments (36) Stumble

Spiritual life

Except it's not really that good. Prey is not the success its peculiar foundations ought to unlock. The things it introduces are interesting and occasionally inspired, but their application is a bit scattershot, and over the course of the relatively slight single-player adventure they quickly blend into the otherwise unremarkable whole.

It also quickly gives the lie to that earlier, utterly fallacious comparison to Hot Shots. Whereas that film and its oeuvre played it straight to the camera so that the audience could amuse itself in the background, Prey is more of a case of watching the drama unfold and glancing around the screen wondering when someone's going to do something entertaining to distract you. There should be comedy here. The manner in which the countless trapped humans you encounter are dispatched by their captors is disappointingly earnest, with none of the schadenfreude of watching a scientist meet his fate in Half-Life.

There's scarcely a character that you can be bothered to empathise with; Tommy's as thin as the paper he always sounded a bit rubbish on. Given that the project was guided by the hand of 3D Realms, a company with more than a passing regard for the exploits of one Bruce Campbell, it's puzzlingly straight-faced.

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There's also the issue of the rank and file FPS elements that underpin all the new technology. Weapons are rarely given enough ammo to become exciting and combat, though it toys with a fourth dimension rarely musters more than a single one when it comes time for the kill. Bosses are particularly weak, brute force affairs that are crying out for a bit of the imagination seen in general ship-navigation, and while the visuals are swish there's a sense that when you've seen one giant liver-failure of an alien spaceship interior you've seen them all - we've seen this sort of thing before in Aliens vs Predator, Doom, Half-Life's Xen and countless other places.

That shouldn't discourage you too greatly, however, because while Prey is ultimately rather less exotic and self-conscious than appearances initially suggest, it's still a game that you'll happily gun through over the course of a dry weekend. The release schedules are practically barren at the moment, too.

The fact that it rarely pegs you back for long is another welcome element. Some have pilloried the Deathwalk system that allows you to cheat death by playing a pop-gun game on the ethereal layer between life and death to resurrect yourself. However, it's more interesting than a loading screen and in a time when many hardened battlers wish games would offer a rewarding experience even in the face of traditional failure, it's a fairly positive example of a developer that believes simply punishing the player for their lack of twitch skills isn't the best way to build on the successes of the past.

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It's a shame the whole game doesn't reflect that strength, and doesn't offer the same brilliantly convincing experience as something like Half-Life 2, but like the scene in front of the mirror at the start, it's a meditation on old themes that works more than it doesn't. It's the sort of game from which anybody who enjoyed FPS games in 1998, when the project began, will draw solace.

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