Prey

At first glance Prey looks like a competently made game. It’s strongest features are environmental design, setting, soundtrack and atmosphere. The problem is that at the same time it’s rather formulaic and hardly innovative, so for anybody who already played games like BioShock, PREY may be all too similar. Narration is largely handled through text and audio logs / calls. Interactions with characters and cutscenes are only occasional. I’m not a fan of such an approach, since games are a visual medium. These disjointed notes and conversations are hard to digest, especially when you’re distracted by combat. Their abundance and the fact that they often concern trivial matters, further discourages from reading / listening to them. There are moral choices in the game; however, for the most part they’re black and white and it’s rather obvious what you should be doing to achieve a “good” ending. Ultimately though, your decisions change little in the big picture, they just affect the fate of the main character. The gameplay is disappointing: PREY features just two unique guns. Shooting is unenjoyable for the most part. Special abilities are rather generic and bland. There are no bossfights, just a recurring enemy that can be avoided, which the game even recommends you to do. You can play stealthily though in my opinion it doesn’t fit a game like this at all. Hacking is very simplistic and unsatisfying. The game artificially inflates playtime by including a tedious crafting mechanic, which requires the player to collect scrap around the station and break it down into materials. Backtracking is also a prominent issue. All in all, PREY falls into the “not great, but not terrible” category for me. It’s pretty average, so I’d recommend to avoid it unless you cannot find a better game to play.

System Shock 2, but with modern graphics, better gameplay and many fresh ideas. Must-have for any sci-fi fan.

Upon release there was no fix for uncentered crosshair, so I refunded the game because by default its optimised for console-aiming, you essentialy stare into the ground - it just feels very weird. Years later (now) you can fix the crosshair, and have it centered. The game feels much more natural and I'm convinced that this is how it was supposed to be for PC version. I've read in other reviews that many people struggled with the difficulty, and resources. And that the weapons don't do damage. I finished the game on Normal and I can't agree with any of that, if you use your weapons properly, such as using eletric damage type towards machines, or blasting enemies upclose with your shotgun, you won't have any issues at all. Nearly all human-size or smaller enemies can be one shot killed with your shotgun. Never have I struggled with resources at any point. I don't think anything else needs to be said about this. It does many things good: - Beautiful design of the map, connecting it together and making some sense - Freedom to explore, many ways to solve and approach your current obstacle - Good sound design, both in sounds of environment and narration - Solid gunplay feeling - Tight player movement, no-gravity-zones also good to move in and felt fluid - Good PC performance, haven't had a single crash - Not a single visual bug on map present that I encountered (Usually in almost each game you find a place on map with forgotten texture or outright can see under the map etc., this is a nice surprise) Negative things: ->Hacking minigame - Incredibly easy, time-wasting sinker. MOD it out! Neutral things: - Pacing of the main story, ending seems a bit rushed. - Design at some places could be more futuristic, the story is set post year 2070 in-game, and you see many technological advancements and future technology. Yet you see old tape projectors and sticky notes and other outdated technology around. More holograms and other high-tech would be much more appropriate.

Prey is what you would get if they took Bioshock into space. The graphics are good (not great) and the music by Mick Gordon is excellent. Prey also has an interesting story that develops the further you get into the game. It even has some sort of big reveal, like Bioshock. I haven't gotten so far yet, but I know it exists. It also suffers from the same problems the first Bioshock has: The combat is terrible and switching between weapons gets annoying really fast. The GOO gun is your main weapon, but you'll have to switch between this and your trusty wrench or shotgun to deal some real damage. There's also a lot of backtracking, because you are in a giant spaceship and you have to follow clues what happened there exactly. So half of the game you are hunting down keycards and missing persons, while trying to evade the shape shifting Typhon enemies. The audio mixing in Prey is seriously effed up: Voices are ear poppingly loud, while the effects are barely hearable. Using the audio sliders does nothing. Supposedly this is some sort of audio bug Arkane's never been bothered to fix. There are a couple of fixes for this online though, but for a game that relies on audio so much this is unacceptable. I enjoy playing it so far, but like Bioshock, it's a bit overrated in my opinion. Prey also has absolutely nothing to do with the game from 2006, so don't get your hopes up that this is some sort of reboot or sequel. It's not.

After playing through Arkane's Dishonored series, I expected great things with Prey. And for the most part, that's exactly what I got. Let's start with the pros: A number of Arkane's signatures are here. An anachronistic alt-history (though at least this time based around an Earth alt-history) that blends the art deco style of Bioshock, the body modding, hacking, and E-Mail lore of Deus Ex, and throws in weapon upgrades and crafting, all wrapped around a sci-fi stealth-horror game in which you can't trust what you see, because what you see may be a real object, or it could be an alien mimic. The gameplay sends you all around a space station's various sections on a main quest, as well as a load of optional side quests. In normal mode the game is pretty hard, and you really have to take your time, be stealthy, and don't engage everything you see, both because ammo can be scarce in the early game, and you can easily die if you're not careful, even against early game enemies. As you progress you will get a psychoscope, which lets you study your enemies and learn their abilities, should you wish to mod yourself with them. But if you apply too many such alien mods, station operators and turrets will turn on you until you hack them, so there's a downside. Some quests will have you taking spacewalks, as well, which is interesting, though painfully slow. Performance is excellent, even on my old AMD FX 9850 + Radeon R9 290X. The cons? Well, there's the slow spacewalks -- seriously it can take literal minutes to get anywhere. While mimics are a scary enemy and can take the form of anything, they're the only enemies that can, and after a certain point they're no longer much of a threat and the premise of enemies that can be anything loses its fear factor. The ending also disappointed me. It was both cliche, and kind of made the purpose of the entire game somewhat pointless. Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent game, but for me, not Arkane's best.