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By Keith B (4th Apr 2007)

Believe it or not, but Prey, and the engine that drives it, has been in development (or limbo, depending on your outlook on such things) for almost a decade. It first appeared when id launched its groundbreaking Quake game, and was touted as a challenger to that title. But as happens in the world of game development, someone up high had more pressing matters to deal with and development ceased.

Now revived, built and polished up, the engine is certainly something that can stand on its own two feet. Many of the original goals of the developers have also been retained when it comes to the specifics of the game it was designed for, such as the setting and characters, and served up is an interesting first person shooter which combines a wide array of features to take note of.

You play Tommy, a Native American Indian, auto mechanic and ex-US Army grunt on a reservation in Oklahoma. All Tommy wants is to get off the reservation, and begs his girlfriend Jenny to come with him. Her bar can’t be left behind, so Tommy finds himself wandering around wondering what to do with his life. While you wander around the bar playing video games, suddenly everything starts to shake and all hell breaks loose. The entire building gets ripped up and you, your girlfriend and your dear old grandpa are pulled into the sky by an alien ship.

Point and, boom

This is where the game starts to get interesting. Once you begin garnering weapons aboard the ship you’ll find their design and use quite innovative. There are simple guns, insects which can be used in a number of ways (mines, grenades), weapons that suck different types of energy from sources for different types of output, and a whole heap more. The actual fighting is pretty good, with the freakish enemies having reasonably intelligent programming which means they’re not too predictable.

Another side of the game is Tommy’s spirit world jaunts. When you die, you are transported to the spirit world where you get to shoot your spirit bow and circling entities, each giving either health or mana when they die. Once you have enough, you’re transported back to your real-world body and play continues. In an interesting twist, you can also enter the spirit world while alive �" and while leaving your physical body defenceless, you can pass through to areas not normally accessible while in a solid state. This makes for some innovative level structure and lateral thinking to proceed.

Think outside the square

But that’s only the beginning when it comes to lateral thinking. The developers have included a strange, sort of portal, system to the game. It allows you to enter a room but the normal laws of physics don’t apply. You could run through a door and find yourself in another part of the ship running along the roof. Or in a specific example right at the start, you enter a room with a pedestal, and on the pedestal is a cube, which would be about a foot wide on each side. Inside the cube is a small ball. You can then enter the cube, suddenly appearing on the surface of the ball (which is now huge). While you run about, aliens enter the room, and from your perspective they appear absolutely titan-like.
Similarly, you can enter a portal in the side of a crate and come back into the same room, but walking on a wall, or roof, or anything else. It’s certainly a new aspect to the game, but I can’t help feel that it’s underused, or not used correctly. Why not be able to reverse gravity in a room, sending bullets back towards an enemy, or letting you force people through portals and have them drop from the ceiling to their doom? If it had been enhanced and not used as a small trick or minor feature, it could have been exciting stuff, working out physics on top of the daily grind of the missions.

This travelling across surfaces is pretty straightforward and while there are times you need to shoot panels to change your direction and such, they’re normally just a case of getting from point A to B. Nothing too adventurous.

To be...

So, once you get well into the game, it’s a case of wondering what could have been. There is definitely potential with the engine and the designers did a good job with their approach, but none of the components are leaders in their field. Quake has frantic gameplay, Battlefield 2142 and its predecessors have a huge online community, the Unreal series has team based combat down well. Unfortunately, Prey won’t challenge any of these crowns.

It could have been a real puzzler, forcing you to approach objectives from multiple angles, or it could have been an all out kill-fest with its focus squarely on the combat. What we have is something in-between, something that is competent on both fronts but not particularly brilliant with either. If the spirit side of the game were developed further, even that could have been a really interesting tangent to take the player on once in a while.

All the components are there, from visuals to physics to creativity, but when you look at its competition in this category, it’s hard to recommend it as anything other than a casual jaunt. If you’re after a first person shooter with a different approach, I’d recommend Call of Juarez instead. And that game has a Native American Indian theme too, and I found it much more fun shooting a pair of old Colts, or a primitive shotgun, than a beam out of an insect’s head.