Prey (Xbox 360)

Tommy has always spurned his spiritual heritage and taken a more materialistic view of things, but now his girl is in trouble he begins to want payback any way possible. A spirit guide senses this, and draws him into another world where he learns other new powers and abilities, gaining his new weapon and knowledge. This isn’t thrown in either, its woven quite nicely into the overall story and introduces a new gameplay mechanic.

Spirit walking: Tommy can project his astral self outside of his body at will and once he does this, his physical form is left there vulnerable (at the first hit he’s drawn back in) and can be harmed by the enemy. Tommy’s spirit self is armed with a bow and the bad guys can’t detect you until you fire, it drains blue spirit energy and the only way to get it back is to kill the aliens and steal their life force.

Tommy can also pass through certain barriers and walk along invisible astral walkways to get to areas that he normally can’t access. There are also several puzzles in the game that require the use of the spirit walk to get past.

And talking of puzzles, the game is made up of a fairly bizarre series of gravity related puzzles at one point, where you’re switching gravity by rotating a room around using shoot-able pads on the walls, these techniques aren’t new to FPS but they are certainly headache inducing after a while.

There is also a hover-bubble kind of vehicle that has a gravity gun and a blaster, this can be used to trap enemies and pick up large pieces of debris from the various levels and the blaster makes short work of various foes from the safety of your cockpit.

If you take away the wall walking, spirit walking and portals Prey is a run of the mill simple shooter, these additions to the gameplay make for some interesting puzzles and a madcap romp through a mind-bendingly devious alien spaceship where an interesting story pulls you along at every twist and turn.

There are no cut-scenes in a 3rd person, they are all part of the game’s engine and they are delivered as part of the action.

Graphics

Prey runs quite smoothly using the Doom 3 engine with additional tweaks and pokes here and there, like the portals for instance. The graphics have that look that marks the engine and are pretty solid, they are not mindblowing and they are certainly starting to show their age against the other shooters that have popped up recently.

Prey takes advantage of various light and shadow effects, particles and glows/blooms quite nicely to provide the right level of tension to the often insane level design. They run nicely on the Xbox 360 and the console suffers no appreciable frame rate loss when things get too hectic.

Textures

Everything has that grim/grimy blood-washed alien death mothership look that the Doom 3 engine is famous for, except that Prey isn’t as dark and tense as Doom 3 was. The texture design however is nice and it fits very well with the atmosphere of the ship, the mix of mechanical and biological parts that are integrated into the vessel are well designed and textured to near perfection.

Level Design

Prey features some of the most insane level design seen in a game at the moment, the mix of wall mounted walkways that wind around some of the environments are mind-bending at best. The link from one level to the next is quite tenuous in some places, you get the feeling that the developers though: hey this is cool, and then promptly forgot there’s supposed to be a story that links these things together.

Tommy goes into a box, Tommy ends up on a rock, Tommy follows that rock around and passes into another portal – Tommy finds himself elsewhere on the ship. This kind of level design could only work in Prey at the moment and the game gets away with it because it is indeed pretty cool and fun.

The Prey levels are mix of run and gun action and various environmental puzzles, only one of these puzzles really has anything to do with the physics in the game as well, so unlike other games that use physics to do puzzles Prey doesn’t rely on that technology and makes use of gravity reversing, portals and general quirkiness to propel the action.

There are some truly nice set pieces that showcase certain environments perfectly, I won’t spoil them but they are enough to make your jaw drop when you first see them.

There is one big caveat about Prey I want to make, you can’t die. If you die you are taken to a spirit world where you must shoot spirits with your bow, red for health and blue for spirit – there’s no sense of danger in that respect and it is very hard to actually fail to get health and spirit energy back. After your body falls through the hole in the centre you are transported back to where you died ready to kick alien ass again.