Prey

Prey : A review.

The basic plot is thus. You are a Native American who has the nickname Tommy. You don't believe in "any of that shit" your old tribal grandfather talks about. Your girlfriend works in a bar and you go to visit her one time. The game starts you off in a toilet cubicle and that nicely sets the "organic" feel for the rest of the game. Upon finding two men being vaguely rude to your girlfriend, you smash their heads in with a wrench. That is the first bit of combat in the game. Then a huge load of aliens come and start abducting people - apparently for the hell of it. You, your girlfriend and your grandfather are all sucked onto the ship. A strange creature on the ship sets you free shortly, you find a weapon, and you proceed to tear ass in every way you can.
The first weapon you get is this pop-gun rifle thing, which for a standard weapon is pretty good. It can either rapid fire or use a sniper scope, a welcome addition in some of the bigger areas. It is by far the most common weapon you use and also the most common your enemies use. The standard troop makes up around 90% of the enemies in the game.


One section came where human prisoners are swung into line in front of a big machine. The machine then hurls spikes and huge metal tubes through the prisoners (rather like the Matrix human-pods, but FAR more brutal), showering blood everywhere. Once they are thoroughly dead and perforated, the machine withdraws, does something weird to the human involving gas, then the next unfortunate soul is swung into place. I must admit I watched this bit for several minutes. I choose to pretend I was seeing how many different human models they'd programmed into the game.

PREY's big selling points are the gravity/scale changing, and the scale of some of the set-pieces. On both counts it succeeds admirably, delivering both mind-boggling puzzles and awe-inspiring areas in which you can do battle. More than once though I was stumped for a brief period while working out which wallwalk was the right one, or which portal I should pop through next. Some of the puzzles - particularly the "Cube puzzle" - are inspired, and these add a lot of longevity to the game.
Shown below is the "Crawler", the Prey equivalent of a grenade. You rip off its legs and hurl it - seconds later it will then explode. Brutal fun. Inside the glass case is a tiny planetoid which you later get shrunk down and teleported onto!


The weapons are perfect in my opinion, although the Hunter Rifle (the first weapon) is too powerful. In the sniper mode it kills all normal enemies with a single headshot while a couple of shots can bring down thougher opponents.
Now a section on my favourite weapon - The Leech Gun.

The Four Flavours of Ownage

Clockwise from top left :

Ice
I almost never used this one. When it froze enemies, instead of making them into ice like one would except it seemed to turn them into creature-shaped balls of clingfilm. Which then vanished. Strange but useful in a tough situation.

Plasma
The most common Leech Gun option and the one I used most until the later two upgrades became avaliable. Fires red plasma. Kicks butt. That's about all there is to it.

Sunbeam
This only comes in right at the end of the game and is far, far too powerful. Tears through anything in moments and is particularly useful when fighting off dozens of "bosses" at the same time.

Electric
The third upgrade which you find around the time of the plane crash. I thought this was the most powerful until the Sunbeam arrived, and one only uses the blasts sparingly because there are only half a dozen avaliable. On the upside, they kill or severely damage most things.

One particularly inventive bit sees the aliens opening a portal right in front of an jet on Earth. The passenger liner flies through and suddenly finds itself in the alien's sphere. It crashes a second later and tentacles from the soft, gooey mush that makes up most of that place wrap around it. Later on your also find a schoolbus that somehow got teleported up in addition to various other relics from Earth.
The voices are generally acceptable but not brilliant. The best dialogue in the game comes near the end when something particularly bad has happened and almost every enemy you kill illicits a "Die you fuckers!" or "Yeah! Die!". Entertainment at its finest.


The bosses are strange because they get worse the further through the game you go. The first boss I really like. The second boss is too laughably bizarre to consider a threat. The third boss is basically just a load of smaller enemies, and the final boss I could hardly work out what the hell was going on. You spend two minutes shooting this spinning sphere thing while it doesn't attack you at all, and then everything goes strange and green and your mission is to destroy a glowing blue chair. Apparently.
There is a huge change around half way through the game. Things suddenly get far, far harder. Instead of meeting nothing but Hunters you're suddenly attacked by these flying bastards and the "Vagina Monsters" as I named them. Why? Because they pop out of this :


and crawl back in again if you hurt them too much. Add the doors that look like flaring colons and you've got a game not for the faint of heart. But a great game nevertheless.