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The Way It Should Be

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I came to play Prey a bit late, but even by current standards, this is a fantastic game. It combines a lot of creatively managed elements that I've seen in other games in interesting and innovative ways.

It is primarily a basic run and gun adventure, but its a lot of fun. The graphics are quite good, and the art is amazing. The length is perfect, and the pace is very good, too.

But what made this game for me was the story. Its simple, but it drew me in and held my attention through the whole game. The characters are excellent, the concept is cool, and it even manages to have a great ending. I have been sorely disappointed by this particular element of several games lately- left with the feeling that the developers ran out of time or money and simply pushed their clearly unfinished product out onto the shelves anyway. Prey was therefore a pleasant surprise- it was clearly passionately crafted with care by talented people.

If you've waited as long as I have to play this game, now is a good time to give it a shot. Its fairly cheap and its completely awesome. I imagine I will be revisiting this one a few times myself.

I don't know why I waited so long

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is a fun game. Weapons, enemies, and environments are imaginative and seriously twisted. Portals and gravity play make for some interesting puzzles too.

Prey

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

"Prey" is weird. It's a weird game. Firstly it's a mix of genres: the game style is solid FPS, but the story is another matter completely. It's urban. It's sci-fi. It's mythology. It's all those things mixed up in a bizarre storyline featuring Native American folklore and levitating aliens.

Perhaps that's not the best start. I'll try again. You are Domasi "Tommy" Tawdi, a man of Cherokee descent wondering if one's genealogy is really worth a damn when you live and work on a crummy reservation, in the middle of a dusty highway somewhere in Oklahoma. Your wrinkly, feather-in-hair grandfather is on your case, fearing for your eternal spirit. Your girlfriend believes in all that crap and doesn't want to move away from her ancestral soil. And you're a garage mechanic who thinks there's more to life that dust in your coffee and truckstop thugs pawing at your girl.

That's how the game starts. You don't like it when thugs paw at your girl. You pick up your wrench - and you bludgeon them to death right there next to the bar. Your wrench gleams with sticky redness in the artificial light from the slot machines. Jen, the girl in question, screams at you. Then there are rays of pale green light slicing through the dirty windows and the cracks in the ceiling, and things in the room start moving of their own accord, and you and Jen and your wise old grandpa are being sucked into a huge craft hovering directly overhead, the jukebox wailing urban rock in your ears, and then--

Weirdness. The story is weird: as a Cherokee apparently with the power to stop the sentient alien "Sphere" expanding around the Earth, you must use your mystic skills to "spirit walk" out of your own body. You can do this to pass through energy field, and flip switches to open doors for your physical form, aided by your dead falcon Talon. Weird. The Sphere is run by a psychic alien race who strip planets for a living to prolong their own existence. Their vast ship is full of wandering tentacles and man-sized sphincters that belch acid. Weird. It's also riddled with artificial wormholes, doorways in the wall or in crates or on rails, that take you to different areas of the Sphere. Sometimes they throw you out on the roof. Distorted gravity keeps you there while enemies warp out onto the opposite wall, shooting at you with bugs that have corrosive gas for blood. WEIRD. You don't even walk on the floor in this game!

In fact, all of this weirdness is used to brilliant effect. The puzzles that sometimes temporarily halt your progress involve using the spirit walking and the gravity defiance to your advantage. Your weird weapons, including the afore-mentioned bug-grenades, vary from standard energy rifles to armour-piercing gun-arms blown from the shoulders of psychopathic alien giants. And don't expect to utilise any cool technology to open all of those cyber-organic doors. You have a severed hand.

In short, with "Prey" you literally don't know which way's up. You don't know what's more real, the spirit or the flesh. You don't know whether that body part on the floor will help you later on. You don't know if you'll rescue your grandfather or your girlfriend, or if those near-humans who are trying to help you will get you killed first. You don't know if you believe in yourself or your heritage.

You're the saviour of Earth, but you don't want the job. Can you handle the weirdness? It's dirt cheap now but sadly forgotten about, despite the good reviews it earned eighteen months ago. Get it. Enjoy it. Forget what's normal.

8/10

Try This!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Inintially, I found this game quite difficult to play and understand. As I perservered I became more and more hooked, as the game has several unique aspects that I had not experienced before. While it plays like a regular first person shooter, its strength lies in the creative puzzles that the player has to solve to continue through many stages. While I had to resort to walkthroughs several times in the early stages, I learned the approach and allowed myself the necessary patience to work it through. It's really fun and challenging.

Great single player - Dead multiplayer, c. Nov 2007

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game can now be found for between $10-20, and is well worth that price. Plenty has been said about the game. The story is well written for an FPS. The handling of death (visible in the demo) and the ease of use of the weapons and pleasant puzzles that are simple enough to keep the pace of the game going are refreshing.

That said, keep in mind that that $20 you're thinking about spending on this game will just buy you a single player game. I got the opportunity to play the multi-player game via the demo, but I swear - there's just as many people playing the demo as there are the real game: 0-2. I've never seen more than 2 people total, across all available servers, in either the demo or the full game. If you're looking for a multiplayer FPS for online play, you're apparently looking at the wrong game, given the apparent death of the community of players.

:Update - Though there are many, many idle servers in the current build of the game, there is often one that lights up with 3-5 players at the end of the week. Still a largely dead community, but there are some multiplayer matches to be had on weekends. Everybody seems to congregate at the same server, regardless of which, but there still isn't ever an adequate number of players to get a decent CTF match going. All DM or Team DM all the time.

PREY!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Prey dominates. Enough said. The graphics were amazing, storyline kept me playing for hours at a time. 3D Reams use of the DOOM3/QUAKE4 engine shows off what this amazing technology can do. System requirements aren't too steep as this game came out in 2005. Its fairly cheap and well worth the money.

Prey

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Good first person shooter. You never really die because you end up in the spirit world where you get to recover and fight again. Some levels take a little more effort to figure out the maze. I needed to go to a third party site to help me through one level. If I would have looked on the floor I wouldn't have needed to. I would recommend it.

Shooter or puzzle game?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: May 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game as a shooter so I am wishing they had some way to let a buyer know that it is also a puzzle game. I don't like puzzle games because they can always make them harder than you can figure out just by being non intuitive. I gave up at the walkway puzzle because I just know that this is the way the rest of the game is going to be.

Prey Stands Out

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Prey is an excellent first person shooter, it's use of gravity effects and portals is unique and engaging. Level's are creative and of a good length. Weapons are pretty standard fare with a few twists that are enjoyable. Enemies are relatively common but plentiful and thanks to the portals they tend to pop-up anywhere. It has a lot of awesome visuals and the graphics are top notch. Sound is excellent and absorbing. Overall I found it an extremely enjoyable and entertaining game.

A good shooter. Decent story, good graphics and pretty fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: April 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Prey is a pretty good first-person shooter. It looks good, has some interesting features and is mostly fun to play. It is a pure shooter, you run around by yourself and shoot everything that moves. You can't hurt anything you aren't supposed to. You can't get to places you aren't supposed to or even go directions you are not supposed to. The weapons are the standard ones: gun, machine gun, grenade, rocket launcher, etc. They have been dressed up in alien clothes but they are the familiar guns you are used to. If you liked Doom, Quake, Fear, etc. you will feel right at home and enjoy this one. FYI - I didn't play the multi-player at all, just the single player game.

It has several gimmicks, one is the native American thing which comes across pretty goofy, its really just an excuse to give you special powers. Hey, in Doom you were half-badguy and got special powers, in Fear you were the brother and got powers, In Pariah you were infected with the virus and got special powers, in this one you are a Native American and get powers. I found the powers themselves pretty useless and obvious. The spirit walk thing was kind of fun but got so obvious and tedious after a while. Stuck on a ledge? You can be sure there is an invisible spirit bridge (why?) that will lead you to the switch. There is a bow and arrow you can shoot while in spirit form but I never did, there didn't deem to be any point.

Other features of the game are the "walk on walls" and "portals". Both were fun but nothing standout. The walk-on-walls thing was primarily a problem solver. Can't get over the fence? you can bet there is a way to flip gravity so you can walk on the ceiling and then flip back. The portals are magic doors that open in thin air and allow you or enemies to walk through. This makes level design easy, you don't need to worry about rooms with enemies, just have them appear wherever you want. It makes for some frantic moments as the enemies pop in wherever they want to. Fortunately they are sent in at a slow pace so its pretty easy to kill them..though I did die a lot as they are pretty good shots.

The death thing turned out to be the worst part of the game for me. The idea sounds good: when you die, instead of having to reload and go back through an area you have already conquered, you go into the afterlife for a few seconds and then get your body back "in the exact same place". In practice it took all of the tension away from the game. No longer did I have to worry about anything, during the ending sequence I probably died 100 times but it didn't matter. By the end I wouldn't even dodge their shots, as I just regenerated right where I was with new health and they were dead. I found it boring to stand in the afterlife waiting for my body to drop. This is an interesting idea but needs a lot of work I think.

The game itself looks good, the metal looks like metal, the alien ship you are in keeps getting larger and larger in scale. It has some really amazing-looking levels. I did find that it tended to drag during the game though. The plot was interesting. I don't think the aliens-conquering-earth plot has been overdone, this game shows that there is still a lot of life left in it. Like most shooters though, nothing much happens. The screens show the exact same images of the Earth being absorbed throughout the game, the radio announcer is funny but seems so out of place. The storyline with Jen was interesting and twisted differently than I expected. I also thought the ending was decent - had a good sequence of boss battles and an interesting ending. I guess thats about all you can ask from a shooter game.

In summary: It was fun, looks good - through repetitious. The gravity thing and portals are fun to experience, the music sounds good and it has a decent story. Plus it never crashed on me once. That makes it pretty good in my book.

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