Prey

For those that recall, Prey has been in development for over a decade and finally in 2006 it goes gold. Prey is a first person shooter for pc developed by 3drealms, the people who brought you duke3d back in the day and who are constantly developing duke forever (lol).

Prey is an amazingly polished short single player fps built in a modified quake 3 engine. It places you in the shoes of an american indian who is sucked off his reservation by the alien invasion of earth by the hunters. You escape and so begins your battle through the big alien world you find yourself on.

There are 3 rather major twists to this game; Portals, altering gravity and spirit walks.
As an indian you are able to go on out of body experiences at your whim and must do so ofter to overcome certain obstacles through your quest as well as occasionally going to the spirit land and talking to dead people. This also cascads into your 'invinsibility' feature where upon being killed you appear in the vision world and must shoot down crazy bat monsters to regain health before they attack your body and you're brought back to reality (or die i guess). This is a weird feature and makes the game pretty easy as there's no go back and try it again from the save point business and you get to just go straight back into the fray
The best part of alien technology for gameplay has to be the portals, which are abundant and frequent, these allow badguys to spawn and allow you to do lots of crawling roung corners and showing up outside etc - these are pretty awesome.
The final twist is that shooting certain objects will alter gravity to be facing the wall you are shooting and can make the level design pretty nuts, it isn't often in games that you need to watch that enemies are's running about on the walls and roof.

The game plays a lot like D3/Q4 but the weapon balance is a little off. You don't get to carry much ammo so tend to just use whatever gun you have rather than selecting guns for specific tasks. The weapons are fun to use and watch but don't get very cool until the end.

Boss fights are nothing more than carnage. Due to the 'invincibility' feature, if you have a good aim with the mouse you can just stand there and shoot it to hell and back and just repeatedly respawn. This easy factor doesn't take away from the insanity of some of the creatures you have to fight which look cool as all hell.

Some scary parts are included but they are little more than funky homages to real horror titles like doom.


basically, PREY is the most polished title i've played in years and although short (completed in one night of sitting up) it retains its enjoyment factor all the way through unlike many other fps games that becomes monotomous by the half way point.

This is definately a game worth getting your hands on.