Prey

An absolutely incredibly game with great gameplay, satisfying gunplay, and breathtaking visuals alongside amazing writing and a great OST. Must play for any imsim or even just single player fps fan.

Plot: 9/10 Gameplay: 8/10 Visuals: 7/10 Sound: 8/10

I loved it up to the point about 2/3 in where my character was just to powerful (no psi, just regular upgrades, hard difficulty level), I had sure way of dispatching any enemy and tension just went out of it. I might try playing it with no upgrades in a year or so. Vert good: Station itself as a level and an environment, a lot of freedom, great atmosphere, attention to detail, not much shovel-feeding narrative or sub-plots. You need to pay attention to playing this, but the game will pay back. Slightly flawed: - Combat does the work but it is not quite there, player has to hit at the right time with the right tool and then it is a breeze. But slugging it out with aliens is usually quickly fatal. Sounds OK in writing, is probably way more realistic than most games, but its just not satisfying. - Stealth to combat balance is also off. If you know the tricks and keep loaded up you can blow up anything and stealth is not at all needed. Maybe some enemies that were super hard to kill could remedy this? - There is a bit of shovel-feeding with narrative. I'd like it more if quests were less intrusive, especially as in first part of the game player is figuring many things on his own - just keep more of that. - NPCs were not great, animation-audio were out of sync and if you had these people there you should have more interactions. Overally I still would prefer this to SS2 where player just saw glipses of other survivors, but it could be handled better. Either have even more interactions, dialog trees, option to coordinate with these people, go all the way. Or rewrite it so in these encounters it would no longer make sense. As is, it is somewhat immersion breaking.

Very good game with meaningful choices supporting a good range of play-styles from sneaking, to hacking, to shooting.

I'm 4 hours in and consistently encounter: - weapons turning invisible in my hands for 5 minutes at a time - margrave shotgun vanishes out of my inventory when I upgrade it - minute long load times between areas on an SSD, think Half-Life on a slow HDD - inventory items (shotgun on top of ammo) being stacked on top of each other and the only way to unstack them is to drop them. Not a bad exploit but... - some items disappear when dropped TBF, I've had games download in a slightly corrupted state from GOG in the past that I was able to resolve by verifying the game. I've done that for this game and the issues persist. I may have to start over... I would recommend verifying anything you download from GOG as the first thing you do. It's a really cool game otherwise if you like bioshock and deus ex, but my god...