Prey

You play as Tommy — a disillusioned, down-to-earth Cherokee Indian. One minute you're milling around in your grandfather's bar, and the next thing you know aliens have landed and whaddaya know they're not the friendly sort. The roof comes apart and you, along with your girlfriend and grandfather, are beamed aboard a monolithic spaceship. To be processed. Which means they're gonna stick a metal tube through your chest and suck your insides out of your body to be delivered to "Mother". She's very hungry, you see.

The storyline itself is exceptional for a first-person shooter. It's deep, occasionally witty, well-paced and involving; Prey is a game you want to progress through just to learn what the hell is going on. The downside to this is that it's also very short, clocking around five hours to play through assuming you know what you're doing. Probably not a game you'd want to pay full retail price for, since the replay value isn't all that great either. Completing normal mode unlocks a harder mode, so it's the same experience except enemies just take more bullets before they die.

Prey's main attractive feature is its use of portal physics and gravity tricks. These play a big role in solving puzzles as well as making you feel as if you're in an alien environment. And disorientating you. There are some really interesting ideas here too, although some of the best are used only once and then immediately forgotten, such as one "scene" near the beginning of the game where a portal transports you inside what's essentially a little snow globe, which challenges your perception of dimensions. So you're thinking, "Hey, portals can open the door to whole new worlds, where you're a tiny Cherokee Indian man fighting hordes of tiny aliens inside a snow-globe". And then the idea is discarded and you never see it again. Portals had potential in this game, but it was never properly realised, so after a few parlour tricks in the beginning they just turn into doors to the next room and consistently fail to throw any more surprises your way.

Enemies are, for the most part, like worker bees in a huge hive: stupid, and only really effective in large numbers. The enemy AI leaves a lot to be desired. There's also little variation here for most of the game. Prey has about five different standard enemy aliens, excluding the bosses, and you'll mostly be shooting holes in just one of these types in a very repetitive, predictable manner. Often they'll warp in via portals and surprise you, but it's not enough to make the combat exciting. Worse, Tommy can't actually die. When his health reaches zero he's drawn into the spirit realm (because he's a Cherokee Indian, you see), where he shoots at the ghosts of the aliens he's already killed in order to harness their energy, replenishing his health and bringing him back to life. Death is a nuisance, but it's certainly nothing to fear. This makes a lot of the boss fights infuriating. Since death is a mere inconvenience, it's almost as if the developers just decided to up the ante and make it damn near impossible to kill any single mega alien without snuffing it multiple times.

All the faults in Prey lie in the gameplay itself, and the wasted innovation. It's graphically very pretty when it wants to be, though you spend most of your time scurrying around drab corridors. Every now and then you come across an area that's more open-plan and gives you a real idea of the ship you're on: that it's alive, and it's freaking huge.

If you're prepared to deal with the repetitive nature of the combat, the constant but meaningless deaths and a lot of samey portal puzzles, then you will find a surprisingly good bit of atmospheric storytelling that you just don't see in a lot of first-person shooters. But it's by no means a great game.