So it’s finally here. One of the most anticipated first person shooters for the PC and Xbox 360 for some time, and having been in development for several years, as well as being stopped in development indefinitely at one point. The question that has to be asked is whether it’s any good and does it really add anything new to the genre.
Your take the role of Tommy, a native indian that is detached from his background and roots, in denial about his people and his culture. Tommy seems to be a “wannabe”, to fit into society without discrimination or malice. Perhaps he was bullied as a kid, and dealt with racist taunts, we don’t really know any greater detail about Tommy, but it would have been nice if we had some real background as to why he feels the need to distance himself in his rich heritage.
You start the game off in a bar run by your girlfriend, as you try to persuade to leave with you and head for the city for a different life. You’re sick of what you’re around, but your girlfriend refuses to leave. To add salt into the wound, your grandfather is bombarding you with mystical nonsense, about a coming that will cause trouble and that you need to prepare yourself. Little does he know how right he is, as after you deal with two drunken American yobs, a green light immerses the bar and snatches everyone to be placed onto a ship. The hostile invasion has just taken place, and you are the prey they are taking.
Everything about Prey says “polished to the core”. The graphics are brilliant, with an updated Quake 3 engine that shows great promise for future FPS games. The models are solid, well designed and offer themselves in equally sound modelled environments with excellent texturing. The bump mapping and lighting, with other special effects such as transluceny and shadowing don’t make themselves truly shown until you enter the spaceship, where you are taken on a guided tour which is quite simply jaw dropping initially. The mixture of organic and technological is really well designed, offering simbiotic relationship that is seamless.
Sound wise, it has the familiar gun sounds, enemies communicate with one another and the opening music in the bar is great. It would have been nice but it’s all environement related. So you get rock music in the bar, and moody, dark and sometimes creepy sound in the deep, dank corridors of the ship. Wait till you meet the creepy ghosts that parade the environement in darkness, they may sound like kids but when they sing “ring a ring a rosies” it will send chills.
The gameplay is broken down into the multiplayer and single player. In multiplayer you have diverse maps in deathmatch and team deathmatch that allow you to walk the walls, ceilings, and floors in tense and pacey action. Because of the intensity of the graphics, having more then a few players can sometimes cause slowdown in the ensuing chaos that takes place.
You’re probably confused by the talk of wall and ceiling walking. So let me explain. The mechanics of the game allow an individual to traverse the environment 360 degrees. By this I mean you can, if you so wish, walk on a platform or activate a switch that will turn the map literally upside down. No longer are you limited to the corridors on the floor. This essentially doubles the map size and makes for some interesting firefights.
Single player is a little more limited in this sense, as the wall walking is only available by activating switches within the ship itself. This is used to create some rather basic, but different, puzzles to escape or enter rooms. Further more, you have spirit walk function. The spirit walk further adds puzzles to rooms which are seemingly out of reach. Spirit walking enables the player to escape their body, which is then vulnerable, and enter rooms or go past force fields enabling switches to allow your real body to enter. It’s a neat feature, as when you die, you enter your spirit walking mode and have to fight for the right to return to the game.
The single player mode also has portals. Portals allow the individual to view and enter different parts of the ship throw a fracture in space and time. This therefore allows you to scope the environment before you enter, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to enter. The aliens you encounter will spawn with this method, so it’s best to keep your guard up in seemingly empty areas. Unfortunately 99% of the time the portals are forced upon you, and you have to enter them in order to get to the next part of the stage. Had they made it more of a choice and alternative route, then it could have made things a whole lot more interesting
In basic terms, the game is a run and gun FPS. The enemy AI isn’t strictly intelligent, but the game does contain adaptive diffuclty, making the game easier or harder everytime you suffer from or kill the enemy. When you die the game calculate the difficulty and adapts accordingly.
Frankly I’m disappointed with the game, for all it’s gimmicks, and they are gimmicks, the game is not the fresh hope many would have hoped. The single player game is decent, but it’s essentially a shallow experience with a decent story line and great graphics. You run and you gun, and sometimes you spirit walk, but you never “die” and so the game is rather easy to play. It’s defintely enjoyable, but it’s a short experience. There is a greater difficulty level but I forsee the same problems with this.
The multiplayer aspect of the game is a lot of fun, and offers a different and refreshing kick in the nuts to the FPS multiplayer genre. It’s a shame the game only has two modes (deathmatch and team deathmatch) which doesn’t match the innovation of the wall walking. Even so, it’s great entertainment, and defintely a plus for the game.
Overall, there’s a lot of good to be said for the game, and lots of postitives to be garnered from the game. We have a decent story, great graphics, and some new innovations. It’s a shame the full package in the single player game doesn’t offer the freedom the multiplayer aspect does, but it does a good job of trying to freshen up the gameplay, and that can only be a good thing.
Verdict: A positive step forward for FPS games, but not quite there yet.