- No bugs encountered. Finished in 9h which matches the time estimate here. - The story seems to begin shortly after the main char has been dumped. He's very much not over it. The first third of the game is a slog full of self pity. Excellent voice acting doesn't help when it relates to MC's insufferable thoughts. Getting over it remains a theme until the end, but the story eventually shifts a bit towards the mysteries of the forest itself, which is more interesting, There are a couple of loose ends though. - Combat has a button to attack, a button to dodge, and a button to play songs (aka cast spells). Attacking also moves the MC closer to the enemy, so after a 3-hit combo you're right on top of the enemy (touching enemies does no harm by itself). Positioning is nearly meaningless due to that. Dodging provides invincibility frames and the best strat for boss fights is to actually dodge towards them because you can follow up with attacks right after. - Decent enemy variety. - Attacks are slow. I'm not sure if one can develop a proper strategy around that. Only the last weapon has a decent attack rate, and is the strongest of the bunch. Combat feels like clunky chaos that is mostly resolved in the player's favor thanks to the healing spell. Other spells are very situational and unneeded. - There are some time wasters like walls that need 3 hits to break or statues that need 12 hits (with the slowest weapon). The game could've just used 1 hit instead and be purely better off. - Dodging requires stamina which constantly recharges, but it's annoying that stamina is a limitation even outside combat when one just wants to move quickly. - Graphics are workable, but sometimes walls are hard to see. The initial part of the game has many treetops that completely block the view when traversing under them. - The foot tap animation while playing is not synced with the song. Not a bad game at all but suffers from questionable design choices. Recommend picking up for 5-10 bucks.
There's no music during the majority of game, with music sometimes beginning to play when halfway through a level and then disappearing shortly after. Levels aren't too hard once figured out, but the figuring-out is punishing: - Enemies or obstacles or platforms may spawn out of nowhere, sometimes requiring split-second reactions. - The camera is zoomed in so much that it's impossible to get into any kind of flow on the first few attempts. Jumping from platform to platform elegantly is easier when one can plan ahead instead of having to regain bearings after every jump because the obstacle after that hadn't even been visible before. This impacts level secrets as well; any crevice is either a cage or extra life, or certain death. - One level in particular decides to arbitrarily take control of the camera in the middle of the level and slowly move it to the right, with no visual or audio cue or even any kind of in-game reason whatsoever. Rayman dies when hitting the left edge of the screen. Mastering this game is not about getting better at controlling rayman but rather dying repeatedly to memorize the key parts of a level. Once that is done, the game is a decent platformer. But that still means spending more playtime being punished before getting into the flow of a level.
I finished the main story in 80 minutes. Resource consumption rate increases frequently, meaning overall consumption is roughly parabolic over time. On the other hand, resources are created (not consumed) by placing buildings, but these are fixed amounts and not rates. With only slightly better buildings becoming available over time, the consumption is guaranteed to eventually catch up and surpass the production, causing a game over. Main story progress persists across attempts. Story objectives are achieved by placing buildings at random locations on the map, which seem to appear just a few tiles away from already placed buildings. Taken together, the main story gameplay consists of placing random buildings in the direction of the next objective on the map. Optimizing building placement for resources is counterproductive because even the best optimization might extend the runway until game over from 40 rounds to 50 rounds or so, but comes with the opportunity cost of not advancing in a straight line towards the next objective, making it less efficient overall. Once the main story is done, the gameplay does a 180 because the goal is then to just survive as long as possible. There's a lack of objectives that actually align with city building. The writing feels subpar at times, where one faction representative personally kills a policeman, and the player then confronts the representative due to CCTV footage. That encounter seems hard to believe because 1) the reason for the killing was rather weak, 2) a faction leader would not get their hands dirty directly, 3) surely in this type of society they would tread carefully around surveillance, and 4) even if they did manage to pull it off, they would be the prime suspect. Finally, supposedly there is English audio, but that is not true.
There's way too much distraction from fun parts like exploring dungeons or other environments: Much of the time is spent on a world map where you slowly travel around on foot or by ship. And make sure to enable level scaling because otherwise you might sail to the wrong place (with zero indication) and get chased and then smashed to bits by a high level pirate ship. Most places that you can travel to basically turn out to be either tiny random encounter zones or just loot drops where you repeatedly say "keep looting" and get some more water or find some coin until it runs out anyway. Who would even stop looting halfway? More time is spent on character level ups; selecting all the skills of everyone in the party is a slog in itself because ability descriptions are doubly nested before you can actually see what an ability does. So when you first hover your cursor over an ability, it provides a very short description that is worthless. Then you rightclick on the ability to get more info. Then that info says something like "grants the Insightful inspiration" and then you need to hover over Insightful to finally get an explanation of what actually happens. Rinse and repeat for the 10 different abilities that your fighter unlocked for this power level (there are 9 power levels). Repeat for all 5 members of your party. Conversations are also tooltip-heavy, where NPCs use newly invented words in every other sentence. So dialogs cannot be really handled with the keyboard because you constantly need to hover over these words. (Or just do not bother.) Combat is quite chaotic but the default AI works pretty well and wins your average fight without any input at all. Characters can also have up to 4 weapon sets, but it's not possible to define a hotkey to cycle between them. More clicking. So combat is streamlined out of the game and dungeon exploration is replaced but an utterly annoying world map. And the rest is boring.
It is my favorite game of all time. It does have some flaws (no weak spots on enemies, mute main character, long loading times), but the zero-G parts are just amazing, the weapon/equipment variety is spot-on and the crafting system works great without going overboard. The GOG version has improved loading times compared to the Steam version. Both versions directly share the settings and savegames without moving files, so comparisons were simple enough. Both versions of the game were installed on the same SSD. The transition from menu to bridge takes 7-9 s on GOG vs 12-14 s on Steam. The transition from bridge to arboretum takes 12-13 s on GOG, vs 19-20 s on Steam. The loading times were one of Prey's biggest issues, so shaving off something between 30% to 50% of the total loading times is good news indeed. And an utter shame that players were forced to play the crippled version with DRM and encryption for so long. Framerates however (on the bridge, no combat) are the same across versions. There is still the issue of the unskippable intro videos but that can be fixed by deleting/renaming them in Prey/GameSDK/Videos and Prey/Whiplash/GameSDK/Videos. The names are fairly obvious like ArkaneLogo, Bethesda_logo, LegalScreens, Ryzen_Bumper.
The quest log is a mess. Gothic 1+2 were much more intuitive. The inventory is a mess. Yes, worse than Gothic 1+2 and those were not exactly good. I enter the first town and in the initial dialogs already get stat check options that are well above my current level. Some of these options disappear forever. Is that supposed to be replayability? NPCs hand out quests leading to overleveled enemies. Why would they even bother giving instructions to a nobody? It would make more sense I had to progress a bit in whatever faction just to build some sort of reputation. For most quests, it is hard to tell whether I am prepared or not; the only way to tell is to walk there. Monster spawns are seemingly random. The rule in Gothic 1+2 was that you encountered stronger monsters when straying further from roads. Not anymore. The map is too large for the amount of content. 90% of the NPCs in this game have nothing to say. I enter a tavern and cannot talk to anyone except the barkeeper. Going from one of the few talking NPCs to the closest other talking NPC might take 30 s. In a town, mind you. Try that in Khorinis. Gothic 2 came with a nice manual that explained combat a bit, in addition to lists of commonly encountered enemies, weapons and armor. How is damage calculated in ELEX? How much of an experience bonus do I get the skill that grants more XP for quests? There is no manual and the ingame descriptions are extremely vague. Weapons in Gothic had some sense of progression (in the first half of the game at least); there was always a better weapon to be had with just slightly higher stat requirements. Now the average trader does not sell more than 2 weapons, both of which require dedicated stat investment for 10 levels straight to equip. Most importantly: The factions are all batshit crazy! I feel like the world would be better off if I wiped out all factions. I could relate (more or less) to all factions in Gothic. In ELEX, none. Even the PC deserves no sympathy.
