Prey
PlayStation 4
At my place of work we have several community bookshelves where people put old magazines, newspapers, and books that they no longer need. I am always on the lookout for old Game Informer magazines. These things are the Holy Grail of the shared bookshelf community. About 5 or 6 months ago, long before I got my PlayStation 4, I picked up one of these Game Informers. An interesting looking game called Prey was the cover story.
I had never heard of Prey before reading about it in the magazine. But I have to say, it caught my attention. The subject material was right up my alley. Abandoned space station with a horror setting? Aliens? First person perspective? I was all over it. I knew eventually I was going to be getting a PlayStation 4. I added this to my mental list of games to check out once I did get the system. I do this all of the time but often I forget about the game and never play it, especially if it is something I had never really heard of before. But for some reason Prey stuck with me. When I did get a PlayStation 4, I made sure it was one of the first titles in my GameFly queue.
The storyline of Prey is... unique. Even after playing through the game I am not sure I can clearly say I understood what I had witnessed. So I'll just give you a basic recap. Your name is Morgan Yu. You control your character as you are led from your apartment, via helicopter, to a testing facility where you have to undergo a question and answer survey and take some basic physical tests. In the middle of your session, an alien appears and kills the scientists around you. Your character blacks out. You wake up aboard an enormous space station called Telos 1. You quickly discover that your life as you knew it was a fake. Your apartment, the testing, even the helicopter ride was just a simulation. You explore the space station, looking for answers.
You find that the space station has been overrun by aliens, the same ones that interrupted your testing simulation. These aliens are especially dangerous because they are shape shifters and can take the shape of anything in the environment. You walk past an innocent looking mop bucket and bam it turns into an alien that attacks you. See that apple which you assume is going to give you a health boost? Nope, it's an alien. You never know what is real and what is not. This is an effective way of creating drama and tension as you play. The game is dark, slower paced, and it doesn't give you an abundance of weapons to work with. In fact, you start out with only a rather ineffective wrench that you use to bash away at your alien attackers. So you really feel as if you are walking on eggshells as you play.
The more you explore the station, the more you begin to discover about your past. Turns out that your previous self (before you lost your memory and entered the simulation) had left a series of notes and clues to guide you on your way. I won't say any more. Not because I don't want to spoil you, which I don't, but also because I don't really understand where the story takes you. Things get a bit overly convoluted as the game goes on and I had a hard time following along with what was reality and what was not. Maybe that is the point of the game. I don't know. But I like clear answers, and this game failed to satisfy me in that regard.
When I first started playing, the first thing I noticed about the game was of course its great graphics. I am new to the PlayStation 4, so basically anything that looks better than a PS3 game is going to impress me. Prey definitely did that. Sharp textures, detailed environments. Prey looks really nice. The makers of the game did a terrific job creating an appropriate sense of atmosphere in this game. Telos 1 is a very believable setting. All of the game's environments look like they have been lived in. Nothing looks sterile, bland, or uniform. It is the little touches that do it. Random clutter on people's desks. Notes written on the wall. Empty food and beverage containers sitting around. Toys and other personal effects sitting out all over the place.
Gameplay takes place from a first person perspective. As you play you gain weapons such as a handgun, shotgun, and a GLOO gun - an interesting weapon that encases and incapacitates your enemies in a hard substance. That being said, Prey is not just a mindless shooter. In fact, if you go through this game thinking you are playing Doom or Wolfenstein you are going to get your butt kicked. You can't just blast everything in sight. Weapons and ammunition are scarce. It is hard to dodge enemy attacks. Your character is quite fragile and will not win a war of attrition if you are battling it out all the time. You have to pick and choose your battles. Try to sneak by your enemies, or run past them hoping you can lose them in the game's corridors.
It took me a while to realize this. Enemies can feel overpowered, especially toward the beginning of the game. I had to adapt my usual strategy of shoot first think later. In fact there were a few areas that were designated on my map as active quests that I had to skip and come back to later because I simply was not strong enough to face the enemies I was encountering. It definitely added to the sense of helplessness and horror as I played. But at the same time it also made the early part of the game seem like a chore to play for me.
Once I got used to the game's mechanics, however, Prey really began to take off. The more of the station I got to explore and the more of the story line that opened up to me, the more invested I became. I took each tough objective as a personal challenge for me to take on. This made each encounter that I passed extremely satisfying.
In addition to the cat and mouse gameplay style, Prey offers a few other innovations that set it aside from the pack. The game has RPG like elements, such as the ability to earn Neuromods that you can use to level up your character and your equipment. When you get deeper into the game you can begin using these Neuromods to modify your character and give him some of the same abilities that the aliens have. Also, the game has a pretty cool crafting system. Normally I am not a big fan of crafting, but Prey really makes it work. Throughout the game you pick up lots of seemingly useless junk like banana peels and used cigars. I questioned just WHY I was picking these things up, especially when I started to run out of inventory space. But then the game introduced to me the Recycler. Throw all the items you don't want or need in the Recycler, and it spits out minerals and resources you can use to craft new items like health packs and ammunition. I actually had a really fun time scavenging for items to toss in the Recycler. For once the crafting system in a video game didn't seem like a complete chore for me.
There are many, many quests to undergo on Telos 1, and you can undertake multiple quests at a time. Many of these are optional and many are story related. Feel free to take them on in any order you want. The decisions you make during these quests affect how the game plays out. For example - use the Neuromods to give yourself too many alien abilities and you begin to lose your humanity. Drones and human-friendly turrets will start to turn on you. The ending changes too. Use the Neuromods to simply enhance your human attributes and those things don't happen. Additionally, if you are a jerk when completing quests and you choose all the evil options this affects how the story plays out as well. For example, I decided to kill a man who got stuck in a cargo pod out in space and this took away several side missions that I would have had access to if I had simply saved the man. This also affected the ending of the game as that decision turned out to be a major one.
Telos 1 is enormous and I had a fun time exploring it. No two areas are alike. You've got the main lobby, the cargo bay, multiple science labs, an arboretum, crew quarters, a dining hall, a kitchen, a med bay - so on and so forth. There are even several points in the game where you have to don a spacesuit and go outside the station to explore. One complaint I have is that there is too much backtracking. You'll find yourself revisiting old areas once you gain weapons, keys, pass codes, and abilities later in the game that allow you access to secrets you could not get at before. Normally I would not complain about this, as it is a common feature in many games. However, the load times are extraordinarily long. Painfully long, in fact. Each segment of the station is broken up into areas that require you to sit through excessively long loading scenes when you attempt to access them. If you have to backtrack through three or four areas, expect to spend most of that time twiddling your thumbs as you stare at a loading screen. It is very, very annoying.
If I had to compare this game to other games I have played in the past, those games would be Bioshock, Dishonored, and Thief. The setting and story line of the game were much more interesting than Dishonored or Thief, which I only mildly enjoyed. I wouldn't say I enjoyed this as much as Bioshock, however. That game had a much more satisfying combat system. And Rapture had slightly more personality than Telos 1. But the parallels are definitely there.
All in all I found this to be a very fun and immersive game. It started out a bit too slow for my tastes, but the deeper I got into the game the better it became. Telos 1 is a fantastic setting and I really enjoyed exploring it and discovering all of its nuances. It is not a perfect game. The combat system could have used some tweaking. The story line fell apart toward the end for me. And the load times... don't even get me started. But I liked this a lot. If you are a fan of first person shooters, survival horror, or RPGs, I would recommend this for you. If you like all three of those genres, then I say hey you need to play this ASAP.
Overall:
B
If you enjoyed this review, check out my review for other games similar to Prey.
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