Prey

  
Although I found Prey to feel a little dated having come out a little more then 3 years ago, I still enjoyed my recent playthrough of this diamond in the ruff of bargain bins. When this game was new, it recieved praise from critics for throwing a lot of unique gameplay elements at gamers and boasting some pretty interesting and detailed graphics and enviroments. While Prey does offer some interesting settings and cool gameplay mechanics, it fails to truly realize the full potential of what these parts of the game could've been and what they could've done. 
  
 Prey opens with the main character Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic frustrated with his heritage and reservation, talking to his reflection in the washroom of his girlfriend's bar. Despite his Cherokee background and ancestry, Tommy doesn't go for "that sh*t" and chooses instead to rebel and live his life the way he wants to, away from the reservation. He asks the same of Jen, his girlfriend, but she is the opposite and wants to stay on the reservation where her family and heritage exist. After choosing to bludgeon two drunken idiots hitting on your girlfriend with a wrench, lights in the bar begin to flicker and something appears in the sky above the bar. Of course, this an alien spaceship that abducts Tommy, his grandfather and Jen, along with many other unfortunates. Once freed from his captivity on the ship, Tommy sets out to save Jen, figure out what's going on, and eventually discover his true destiny. 
 
 You begin Prey the same way you do with many other shooters, limited weapon options. Although you start with a meer wrench, Tommy soon has an encounter with a hunter and takes his gun from him. There are over six weapons you will use over the course of the game, along with "crawler grenades", which you can use by pulling their leg as if it was a pin for a frag, or flip them over to use as a sticky grenade. Aside from the wrench and machine gun/sniper rifle, you will gain possesion of other guns. These include the Autocannon, which acts as sort of a heavy machine gun/grenade launcher. The acid sprayer, a shotgun that will dissolve your enemies with a spray of acid and can shoot long-range as well. The crawler launcher, which as the name implies is a rocket launcher. And my personal favourite, the leech gun, in which you leech four different forms of energy from power terminals which inculde plasma bursts, lightning-bursts, ice waves and the sunbeam which you'll find later on in the game. Although the enemies are largely easy to deal with and generally don't offer much of a challenge, with the exception of a few unique aliens,  all these weapons are unique and fun enough to keep combat interesting. 
 
 Aside from your standard arsenal of weapons, Tommy will also gain the ability to "spirit walk", allowing himself to seperate his soul from his body to shoot arrows at unsuspecting enemies and solve simple puzzles. These puzzles are rarely challenging and usually involve you walking into a barrier you can't get through, spirit walking through it, and then pressing the button to disable the forcefield. There are a meer couple of instances in this game where I found that spirit walking was used in a more interesting manner, but it is sadly just a cool idea they failed to truly execute on and could've been so much more. Spirit walking also does a fine job of not making Prey challenging at all. If you die in the first couple of chapters in the game, you will need to either start from the beginning or from your last place you saved at. However, once you gain the spirt walking ability in the fourth chapter, you will be able to "death walk" whenever Tommy is killed, in which you must shoot red and blue wraiths, which hold health and spirit power respectively, with your bow until you are sent back to the living world in a matter of 10-20 seconds. Thus, no true death penalty exists, other than having to wait a few seconds while shooting red and blue wraiths...every time.  
  
 Aside from combat, other gameplay elements exist that relate largely to the puzzle-solving portion of Prey. The laws of physics don't exactly apply in this spaceship you're romping through, and you will be able to jump through portals to make progress, walk on magnetic rails, as well as shoot panels on the walls and ceilings to walk along them and get past barriers. When dealing with open enviroments, the gravity-defying portions of Prey are at their best and most interesting. However in more linear enviroments, which you will mainly find yourself throughout the course of Prey, they feel a little less interesting and aren't as much fun to play around with.  
 
 Aside from the main single-player campaign, there is a multi-player mode that can support up to eight players. You can play two different modes, deathmatch and team deathmatch, in either player or ranked matches. Although the community for Prey is, for lack of a better term, "dead"; due largely in part to games such as Modern Warfare and Gears of War released since Prey's launch, I managed to jump into a player match with a couple of other people and had a good time. There are several maps inspired by enviroments within the single-player game loaded with weapons, and you can use gravity to your advantage which keeps things interesting. Although the game mode options are limited, if you can get a game going, you'll have some fun. 
 
 The graphics in Prey run on the Doom 3 engine, and the game looks exceptionally well. While I'm aware the framerate fails to remain consistent while you're playing, it wasn't enough to bother me or even to get me too notice. Some of the different enviroment and character designs look pretty cool in Prey, although some appear to be generic and bland. In linear enviroments, Prey faces no real issues with bland textures and looks great. With more open-world enviroments, like I mentioned before the framerate isn'y quite as consistent and it can appear somewhat choppy. But for a three year old game, I didn't find the graphics to be a problem in Prey and thought the some of the more detailed set pieces really set an excellent tone for Prey. 
 
 The audio in Prey, other than some ridiculousness such as aliens talking fluent english, is pretty well done. The music sets the tone well, and the sound quality is generally exceptional. Voice acting is nothing amazing but it works and sounds fine. You'll be able to hear a lot of licenced music in the beginning of Prey by using the jukebox. It seems a little ridiculous that they went so out of their way to garner all of this licenced music for one part of the game, but it's nice that it's there. 
 
 So basically, I think I've said all I can say about Prey. Despite its age, I'm glad I got a chance to play through this game and enjoyed my time spent with it. I think Prey could've been a lot better then it is had it executed better on some of the ideas it offered, but for what it's worth, did these things well enough so it's forgiveable. For a $10 game, Prey is well worth your time if you haven't already played it. The campaign is short and sweet and with it's lack of any real challenge saves you from frustration. Add to that a set of easy achievement points and Prey is an excellent bargain-bin package.