Prey Review

Interface

The game’s HUD is pretty minimal and shows your health and spirit levels along with an ammunition bar for your current weapon. Pressing a weapon hotkey displays a mini-menu with all of your weapons and their current ammo bars.

The game’s configuration menu is excellent; it’s well laid out and very easy to change settings to your liking. The only bug I found was the “adaptive difficulty” setting didn’t stick between play sessions.

You can quick-save/quick-load whenever you like plus the game automatically rotates between five quick-saves and automatically saves level checkpoints too.

Technology

Powered by a modified version of the Doom 3 engine the game is capable of delivering very nice visuals. Apart from the great shadowing and lighting the texture resolution is also top-notch. The game manages to pull off the stark contrast between cold metallic areas and warm organic sections very well, and is also capable of rendering very large open areas. On demand lighting is provided by Tommy’s lighter which heats up when turned on but cools down when switched off.

The game also supports 3D sound through OpenAL so the sounds have pretty good reverb and positioning and the ambient sounds in particular can be quite immersive.

Patch 1.4 officially removes the CD check so kudos to the developers for supporting legitimate users.

The game is reasonably demanding for a 2006 title; with full detail levels enabled the game seldom dropped below 50 FPS on my 8800 Ultra running at 1920×1440, but I could “only” use 4xAA.

Summary – Pros

• Interesting mix of alien and Cherokee Indian plot elements.
• Weapons have an original feel to them.
• Excellent graphics.
• Good voice acting along with a main character the player can associate with.
• Immersive sound.
• Good mix of corridor crawls, vast wide open spaces, metallic and organic areas.
• Unique puzzles based around gravity, portals and spirit form.
• No disc required as of the 1.4 patch.

Summary – Cons

• Can be linear, on rails and/or repetitive at times.
• Replay value isn’t high.
• Relatively small selection of enemies to fight.

Conclusion

Prey isn’t the greatest game in the world but it’s a solid and fun shooter with plenty of interesting elements. If you explore thoroughly and admire the visuals single player will last about 8-12 hours. Replay value isn’t huge but for an extra challenge you can replay the game under Cherokee mode.

Rating: 7 / 10.