A solid experience with loads of action
Pros: The best thing about Prey is the setting. Your in a giant alien ship called "The Sphere", which is a living breathing thing. Everywhere you look there are anus holes in walls that spit what looks like diahrea and body parts (I'm guessing the people they murder are being fed to the ship.... and that those holes are actually, yuck). Anyway, this game is all about looking around to me. There are screens everywhere that have alien messages on them that translate when you go into spirit walk. They say things like "Remember, all of the protien is for mother". The graphics are so good. There are these rooms with tubes of blood running through them that are incredible. About now your saying .... what about the shooting. Well, mad violence is in full effect with Prey. Tons of shooting, tons of blood, and some of the best gore sound effects I've heard in a long while. I have a pair of surround sound headphones, and when you plug an alien you can hear the bullets (or lasers, whatever) meeting flesh. The guns are interesting to look at with the whole organic look.... but they could have just given me the first machine gun and grenades and I would have never noticed. The first machine gun is such a nail driver I very rarely use any of the other weapons, there is no need too with normal enemies. Prey got closer to getting grenades right.... but all grenades are stupid since the halo series came out (see cons). The portals and gravity switching is really really cool. Other games have done similar things, Prey takes it too new levels. You can flip a room a whole bunch of times just to find a portal in a box, then you fall through it and the gravity is different on that side of the portal, so you can fall any direction from there. Really disorienting, very cool. The presentation, effects, and shooting are all great.... but.........
Cons: The biggest being that Prey rips off alot of "ideas" from other games/media. In the begining when your watching your grandfather be slaughtered, you can tell the dudes over at human head have played way too much Quake in the last few years. It's unoriginal in some aspects and totally original in others... but when you see the story rip something off from another game for the first time, the excitement of Prey takes a hit. The grenades are a great idea, but are uninspired and difficult to use in a pinch. All FPS games should rip off COD2 and Halo for their grenades! It's mostly the secondary function of the grenade that makes it hard to use in tight spots. SHOULDER BUTTONS ARE FOR GRENADES PEOPLE!!! Another thing I don't like about the game is how mis represented the "cherokees" are... but I'm not cherokee, noir native american, so it doesn't matter too much I guess. It's too easy as well, with the hard difficulty only unlocked through playing it once through, bad idea Human Head.
Bottom Line: I hope Prey 2 fixes this game's small problems. With it's little problems fixed, with more originality thrown in the mix, Prey 2 could easily be a true Halo killer.