Customer Reviews

Prey

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Each year, I wait for something to come out to blow me away. FEAR was the last one that I actually could not get enough of. Now PREY appears, and WHOA, what a ride. Fantastic visuals (I mean FANTASTIC). Great dynamics in control of the characters, cool weapons, the anti gravity stuff and portals are mentioned quite a bit by most who comment on this game, but they are just part of the whole thing.

The voice acting is almost uniformly great (with the exception of Jen sometimes), and the story is mostly original, save the overall plot, which we've seen a zillion times before. But the characters are new to the genre, (nope, no super human marines, or master gunfighters) and treats the traditions of the cherokee with respect and dignity.

There are some moments where it feels like some other games, an occasional dopey boss battle, and too many elevators, but wow, the overall pace, artwork, character control, and AWESOME MUSIC makes it the most movie like video game I've EVER played. Yes, even more than Half Life 2. The health regeneration is a little annoying at first, but then you learn to appreciate it somewhat, as it is less disruptive than having to go back 2 or 3 saves and start over.

One more comment on the music. I was amazed at how cinematic it was. I felt like I was in a live action movie sometimes. Just awesome.

My library of PC games numbers over 100, and I've played them all. But this one is in a class by itself. Yes, its somewhat short, but the work that went into it was intense.

I would ignore most of the adolescents that talk about the "doom 3 engine" (heck most don't even know what it means, they are just repeating some noise they saw on some forum somewhere). What the inside technology is has no bearing on the implementation of the game, story, visuals, music and scenarios. This thing is just plain great if you like the alien/hero shooters.

I can't wait for more. Kudos to the developers and artists that built this thing. What a piece of work

Graphics. Not bad. Music. GREAT. You get samples from the Grateful Dead, Judas Priest, Ozzy Ozbourne and SO many more. Physics? So real it just *may* make you a little queasy at first. Story line? Totally UNREAL. The storyline consists of Indian folklore. This is not your typical shooter in most ways. Sure, you have weapons, sure you blow a lot of crap up. But, that's where the similarities begin and end. There is so much more richness to the environment. There is so much more challenge here than is in most FPS games. So, to the reviewer who poked fun at us gamers J. Jiminez (below), the reason we get so excited about the latest game and the latest technology is very much similar to the reason why you feel the need to be so judgemental and pompous. We just can't help it. It makes us feel good. Hopefully his review hasn't been deleted. Otherwise this whole rant will look rather foolish.
Anyway, this program runs VERY well. It takes up about 1.5 gig in drive space. Very little for such a fully loaded game. It does come on a few CD-rom discs. It can be a little complicated for the run0and0gun types. A little like Deus Ex meets Aliens VS. Predator. You get to walk on the walls and ceiling a lot. This truly is a special program that deserves to get a LOT of attention.

Prey is a bona-fide 5 star game. Play it soon because everyone is going to be raving about it. The SUMMER BLASTER for 2006 is HERE! Basically it is Turok meets Doom 3 on steroids. If you like first person shooters (fps), then getting Prey is probably the next best move you will make next to owning Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and F.E.A.R. The future of fps in space has not outlived its lifespan. If you liked Doom 3, which was the last good adrenaline pumping monster mash on Mars, then you will love Prey. Prey is back to basics again, whopping up the graphics considerably, brilliant lighting effects and a frightening story to boot that isn't afraid to have lots of gore and shocks around the corner. It has a certain feel of HALO about it too with its alien-type weapons. You play an Indian who has been beamed up off his reserve into a spaceship where the aliens are eating up the humans. Prey has awesome in-game action sequences and is quite shocking for the sum of its fiendish parts. You have an old Indian trick out-of-body-experience (OBE) which helps you to reach areas in the rooms you can't normally get to. The rooms also rotate when you shoot switches which offers various level puzzles to get through. Most of the time you totally loose your orientation which makes the play even more fun, especially when portals start opening after room rotations. Duke Nukem lovers will also enjoy the fun on display. An alien's severed hand to open doors is a nice touch. Art Bell's radio talk-show of the aliens invasion is broadcast at various junctions in the game. You don't die either. Well you do, but you are given unlimited chances to regenerate your blue or red health by shooting at blue or red birds in the land of your ancestors. It is a great idea and works. The Boss fights are massive. You even get to fly some aircraft with fire power. Running along anti-gravity tracks around rooms upside down and across walls while unloading your gun into the screaming aliens that have driven people insane who are crying banging on doors is probably reason enough to own the thing if it wasn't for the photorealistic gfx. Slime on the wall has never looked so real. The end boss battles are amazing. The graphics are simply outstanding. This is a high quality fps that deserves your time and CPU power. Prey it today.

*ADULTS ONLY*: contains VIOLENT GORE and BAD LANGUAGE.

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.

I really looked forward to Prey and I wanted it to be a landmark game to end the year. It was a major disappointment. No puzzle took much thought to solve and no boss took much to defeat. Everything was obvious in the game. Follow the ONLY path and kill everything. I forget the names of the chapters, but about somewhere after killing the boss that was part Jen and part Alien (from Alien) It started just DRAGGING on and on. The graphics were great I have to say, but I really didn't catch much soundtrack, except for the parts where you found the bar blended into the alien ship. All the puzzles can easily be solved by a 10 year old and the bosses by an 11 year old. My biggest gripe had to be the insane load times between chapters/levels. Five to ten minutes for a level to load! I don't have a wimpy system either (AMD 5000+ dual core w/7800 GT) so it wasn't me. The whole game took a little over 6 hours to play and probably 1/3 of that time was waiting for the levels to load.

My advise is to wait for this game to be in the bargain bin sometime after February for $20. Sorry, but I too really wanted this game to be a hit...

"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

Prey breaks some new ground in first person shooters. Being set in a space station, artificial gravity is the newest spin in the mix. You have walkways that lead up on celings, and by shooting "gravity flippers" you can also change which direction is down. Portals are everywhere, which let you walk into another room, or another part of the ship. The levels range up to enormous sizes and the designers have put the new capabilities to good use.

Prey is probably the first (and likely only) Cherokee Indian inspired outer space first person shooter. The graphics look great, it's fast paced, and, well, what's wrong with it?

Prey reminds me an awful lot of an older 3DRealms game, "Rise of the Triad." That game featured huge levels and these trampoline/jumper spots that would launch your character all over the place. It was a lot of fun at first, until you realized that despite all the jumping it was just shooting the futuristic Nazis over and over. The same with Prey, every time you press a button you know three or four Hunters will come out a bunch of portals at you.

The things I'd really liked about recent shooters like FarCry was the variety. That game took place in settings everywhere from jungle islands to ancient ruins to industrial complexes. Prey takaes place entirely in the sort of bio-mechanical/industrial environment science fiction has too much of. The enemies aren't particularly bright, and the combat is several steps backward.

Overall Prey is getting good marks for the mutliplayer portion, but the single player leaves something to be desired.

The graphics and gameplay are pretty good. Not the best, but worth picking up for a few days of fun and action. If possible, try to pick up a used copy or one that is on sale.

However, I did need some support and the makers of this game was unwilling to give any. I've never heard of 2K Games before but if they make anything else in the future I'll avoid picking it up. There are no patches, thier support forums are hardly worth visiting, and when asked to support their game they flat out refuse to do it.

So, BUYER BEWARE. When the game works, it is pretty decent. When it doesn't, you are screwed because there is little, if any, recourse especially since the store I bought it from refused to refund the money because it was an open product (I don't blame them, if I ran a computer game store, I'd have the same policy).

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.

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.