Prey: Digital Deluxe Edition

This is a great step in the right direction for modern immersive sims, and I want to highlight three things that especially impressed me: 1. The level design is BLESSED. About on par with the original Deus Ex. 2. This game really rewards you for trying creative solutions. It wants you to approach combat and areas like a puzzle, not a shooter. 3. That said, this is the best-feeling FPS I've ever played. It's super smooth with lots of options, and you have a lot of control over your movement, such as sliding across floors when sprinting or leaning around corners, etc. Everything feels great and is responsive. It's a proper immersive sim through and through... BUT This game has a terrible double whammy: constant backtracking and respawning enemies. Holy hell does this game start to feel like a chore after a while. Exploration is great, but going back to a now repopulated area you've already explored thoroughly just to grab something or go to the one room you couldn't get to before feels pointless, grinds the pacing to a hault, and makes me feel like a janitor just trying to keep the ship clean. This is a space sation with tight corridors and rooms, so avoiding combat is difficult. This is further exacerbated by the aliens being kinda boring with not much variety and a lot of repetition. That said, still a great game and a worthy addition to the immersive sim family. I hope it inspires future immersive sims and RPG FPS's because it got ALMOST everything right.

Honestly, I never heard about this game's release. I knew nothing about it. Then I heard it was pretty good years after its release. I am still deep in the main campaign as of this writing. It started off a tad slow and I thought it was a bit generic. A little bit of HL2, a little bit of System Shock/Bioshock etc etc I'm wrong. This is a thing all on its own. As I progress I realize the developers are slow to reveal their secrets. A deep and complex leveling system, weapons system, everything system. I mean it's absolutely incredible. When I took my first spacewalk I was mesmerized. The zero gravity areas are done extremely well and the controls are almost spot on intuitive. Most problems you encounter can be approached with different solutions. Bottom line, it's one of those games you can't wait to get back to. A rarity for me. Performance: I am running the game at its highest settings @ 1920x1080 on a 2080. Smooth as butter and drop dead gorgeous with plenty of FPS to spare. Not even a frame drop, anywhere. I would definitely call this the sleeper of the decade. Amazing achievement.

Prey is not a revolution. It is more than that : a synthesis of the best things the FPS genre has given. Half-Life + Deus Ex + Metroid Prime + Bioshock + its particular identity : here is Prey. An absolute masterpiece that must be known and played.

I enjoyed this more than Half-Life 2 and System Shock 2. It got so much going for it: Gameplay, horror, combat, immersion, suprises. Even the intro will give you a "wow" experience. And just wait for the ending

I don't usually buy games full price, so I slept on this one for a while. For $12 base game+Mooncrash DLC, my god. I feel like I robbed the developers in a way. I would pay full price for this if I had known what I was going to be in for. What a ride. The mechanics, the narrative, the environmental storytelling, and the level design come together so beautifully. I truthfully had some great moments with this game. The jump scares, the moments my jaw literally dropped in awe at what I had either witnessed or achieved, and the overall bone-chilling first-time encounters with some of the enemies aboard Talos I I had, were worth every penny. Then I started the Mooncrash DLC. Just when I thought my palms couldn't get any sweatier, this game up and turns the notch up to 11 once again. The new and fresh randomly generated encounters, the risk-of-rain diffifulty scaling, and the additional narrative-driven story objectives for all the surivors really delivered another 5 star experience that I have never experienced in a DLC. Arkane, you guys have truly outdone yourselves. Those of you reading this, if you're anything like me and want the absolute most bang-for-your-buck experience from a AAA title, look no further. You will not be disappointed. 5/5 stars. Even one this sale ends and this goes back up in price, it is AGAIN still worth every damn penny. ~fin