This isn't the worst game, but its boring, simply boring.... it can be worth playing if you want to learn a valuable lesson about how not to make a game boring, basically do the opposite of this game. Positive side at least, my 14 hours with the game, i had no crashes and the framerates were stable at 2560x1080 on a 970gtx. But with the tiny world size i would have been shocked if the fps was bad, because there is nothing to see in this game, its mostly either dark or you are in a small room with really muddy graphics.
What makes this so average and a game that I can't recommend to many people is because its taking all the annoying and boring things we had in old games like finding boring keycards and backtracking all over the place for the entire game. As well, the enemies you fight in this game are the most uninteresting and boring things you could imagine. They make no sense, and all act the same way and look like a big black ink splat. The powers you can learn are junk as well, the only useful one is the time slow one, the gameplay is so bad that its not worth even trying to switch through to the other ones on the god awful wheel select they have.
And the weapons are awful... weak is how i would put them... you never find a gun that you feel strong with... and inventory system is just far too small. They make stacking items really bad, and the junk you find counts as slots as well. And you will be looting a lot of things to recycle and craft ammo to fight all these boring ink splat alien things. This games mostly a grind, a time wasting grind that when combined with endless backtrailing and bad map design you float around in space in the worst movement you could think up. This game is 2 hours of content that is stretched into 12-14 hours due to the constant loading screens, backtracking and getting lost with the bad map system. I was laughing when you are in space and you can't see a god damn thing through your honeycomb helmet... its like they wanted to troll the players and be like... ya space is really shitty and hard to see what you are doing, lets make a helmet that makes it even worse to troll the players more and make the game more painful to play and see if people buy it.
Just another sidenote about the already mentioned bad inventory system. Trying to move items around has to be the most broken i've seen, this games controls were programmed by a crackhead. I was moving stuff around from my inventory to the recycler machine and its near impossible to move items. If anyone could make a worse engine for inventory management i'd love to see it. Hey guys, lets make the worst inventory controls of all time and see if people still buy the game... and guys, lets make the inventory small, but yet lets make a ton of little junk items that you always pick up so it makes the inventory get full instantly and be a frustrating mess. People will buy the game cause they love the clutter and frustration, its immersive guys.
I saw a lot of mixed reviews on this game, either lots of low scores, or lots of perfect scores, likely mostly all fake reviews because this game is not a 10. If you like to relive all the buggy mechanics from old games i guess this is the game for you. I still can't believe how many times they make you wander around looking for a dead person to find a keycard, its like they wanted to make this game as annoying as possible and see if people would still buy it.
****Spoiler a bit below***.. this games got an extremely small map, but its probably bigger than Bioshock. It all takes place on a spacestation, and so many of its rooms either look the same or are tiny. You backtrail through the spacestation which is annoying by itself... but imagine the hours of backtrailing mixed in with more loading screens you've ever seen in your entire life. This game couldn't have put more loading screens in they wanted to... again, i think this is a troll from the developers to see how annoying they could make the game because PC's have over 16gbs of ram on average now and they could have background streamed the entire game into ram and avoided all load screens. Instead you are in a room, run forward 50 steps, another loading screen... its worse than the original Fable game on xbox, that game actually had less loading screens.
And at the end of the game... if you actually get there, is a really big let down. It reminds me of Deus Ex, how you could pick a couple different endings but gave you nothing interesting to watch after you picked them, the game just ends and its like... ok, 14 hours to see this shit? Its either, evil choice ending or good guy ending and it ends the same either way. I guess you get slightly different chatter at the end depending on who you saved during your game, but has no effect on the end.
I didn't love the original Prey, but its a much more fun game, you don't backtrail in that game as much. But it had its problems also... i felt sick with some of its gameplay mechanics and its story was bad as well.
What can be learned from this game? Well, you can make a game with broken 1990s gameplay mechanics and there will be fanboys that will love that and give the game 10's, but we should be making games less tedious and removing the boring features from them like hunting around for bullets, or trying to find keycards, and trying to navigate and backtrail a broken map. You can't even mark your own waypoints on the map, its fucking awful. Even a bad pc port like mass effect let you click on the map and setup a waypoint for easy navigation. Actually mass effects alright, the map is easy to navigate, just this games wasted 14 hrs of my life.
I haven't a clue what score to give this, i guess a 5. Its average, its not a game i would say to play unless you love extremely tedious backtrailing. Also some of the quests bugged out also, fucking Alex died even though i put him in the bunker and locked the door behind him, the quest didn't complete. I ended up loading the save game and just beating him to death with my wrench in rage. Which brings me to a positive note, you can kill anyone you want in this game which is actually nice, so that is one non-linear part in the game. Its too bad it really makes no difference though in the big picture.
Last thought. I keep thinking about the first prey in 2005 or 2006. I didn't even like it much, but i still remember the gory terror i witnessed in some of the games areas. There were some graphic scenes in that game which really put you into the game and you knew that you were in the shit when dealing with the aliens... you would see human guts and gore and you knew you could be next. This 2017 game had none of that, it had poorly modeled characters that looked like stiff bodies on the ground, they looked like crappy cartoon characters. There was some serious fear in the first Prey game seeing how the people were basically dogmeat to the aliens, these ink splats in 2017 prey were not scary and didn't fit in reality at all, they looked like they belonged in a batman cartoon. I hope whoever designed the 2017 prey game never is allowed to make another game.