Quick Look: Prey

Prey

I love their no review copy policy now, it means you don't buy games day one based on reviews. Instead you wait a couple weeks for the reviews, by which point the hype has died and you move onto the next thing.... Until a Steam sale 6 months later where it's 75% off the original price and you end up getting it for £15, but you still never end up playing it.

This seems to be my experience with games that lack hype due to no reviews... it's a real money saver.

Meanwhile Zelda reviews got me to buy it twice (Wii U) and a Switch lol.

Praey

Really enjoying it so far, Feels like a cross between Dead Space and Bioshock. Basically System Shock.

Game's been out for nearly a day and I have no idea what the quality of the game is. Great job Bethesda!

So...am I the only one that noticed this knob (main character) took a helicopter to go 2 city blocks during the opening? Look I know it's dumb, but you just see this guy's apartment and know he is posting pictures of every meal he has onto instagram.

Does this still control like garbage?

$48 with Amazon Prime and yes I caved and ordered it today. Space Horror is totally my thing.

Man I hope this game is good.

...but odds are everyone on staff will hate it regardless lol.

Is Ben... like always...high?

That is a very good thumbnail!

@jwl1092: Every time I hear or see "Bioshock in space" I cringe a little. The glorious return of System Shock can't come soon enough.

Hey, its time to play Prey. Yay!

feeling the vibe this game is putting down but the combat in the demo suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked

He's like 7 foot 10, so yes.

Been playing PC version for a good chunk of today and I'm enjoying it a lot. Lots of Deus Ex, Dishonored and Bioshock vibes (been a long time since I played SS2, I can see a connection though SS2 was a lot more difficult, maybe if I was playing this on hard?).

Regardless, I'm impressed so far, I like where the story is going and it runs great on my pc (1440p, r9 390, mostly very high settings and around 60fps).

Been playing this on pc, runs just fine. no fancy hi res textures, unfortunately, but the game looks fine. I tend to play the game the way I play all these games, which is sit on skill points until i get to an environmental puzzle that i can't get past.

Also, inventory upgrade is on the skill tree, and i took the first couple upgrades real early on (by the point brad starts in this video).

Also Edit Also: Holy shit those load times! For a game with a quick save and quick load, that level of slow load would kill a save scum stealth playthru

Yeah I'm not loving the combat so far, especially with the sluggish controls on PS4, which is why I keep harping on wanting more weapons and powers in the video. Hope there's a lot more to play with.

Happy to wait for this one's inevitable quick descent to fifteen dollartown. Shouldn't be but a couple months. Bethesda is doing itself no favors by kneecapping the excitement around its games to spite the press.

I want to like this game, I really do, but from playing the demo and watching this, it's been rough...

The concept and the story seem cool and I enjoy how the environment has lots of details to explore, but movement is extremely floaty, controls are laggy, and the combat is frustrating. The audio is really weird, poorly mixed, with music often starting or ending at random times. It also doesn't help that the art-style looks a lot like Dishonored, which I dislike, and the game seems to be like Bioshock, which I also disliked.

Also, inventory management, crafting and stamina bars. I'm a bit tired of those.

@noku said:

:( I really liked the title of that game.

I didnt even know this game was out now! thought it was out in like a week or 2.

Finally! I was getting the shakes.

EDIT - We've got to Prey just to make it today

The combat will ultimately be what you make of it(a ton of stuff to experiment with). If you try playing it like a shooter I think you'll end up having a bad time. It's way more like System Shock/Deus Ex than it is Bioshock.

Thrust Ascend Descend Roll Brake. :)

Shawn Elliott worked on this game, for that reason alone I want it to do well.

Why do an hd remaster Prey, of all things? The game's not that old. What a cash grab.

The combat seems frustrating in the same sort of way I found Dishonored to be incredibly frustrating to play. A lot of options to experiment with, which is neat, but just not coming together in a satisfying enough way.
Arkane knows how to create interesting settings for their games I give them that. I just don't know if I would enjoy playing this.

Are you kidding me about the "can't have original Prey installed in steam library" thing!? Did they not QA that at all!?

I like how Ben ends the quick looks with a "Ehh..". That should be a thing from now on :)

@cyberspacecat: There should be a law making it mandatory to put numbers behind the title if it's the same.

If new Battlefront games were on Steam the results would be the same.

"There's no radiation is space, only air can have radiation"

oh Science, why have we forsaken thee?

This seems reaaaally cool. Some of the best style I've seen this year. Definitely feels like System Shock and Bioshock and the like.

I Remember Citadel.

This looks far more like system shock than I was expecting, I thought it was going to be another mindless shooter.

Are you playing it on PC or PS4? Because on PS4 the problem isn't how you play, it's the way it controls and how the enemies behave. I'm not much of a shooter guy, I didn't play the demo as a shooter, and I got really annoyed with the combat fairly quickly.

I love you.

What I'm not sure of is how anyone would have original Prey installed in their Steam library, considering it's not a game available on Steam.

I'm happy about another BioShock/System Shock like-game. Going to play this soon. Also good to hear that the PC version is apparently good.

Ben is a god-send.

The one hour demo really underwhelmed me in more ways than one. I played it on a regular old PS4 Amateur but I thought it looked either like a super late lastgen game or a launch lineup game for this current generation. It just looks and feels like an "old" game and not meant in a good way.

I did play it on normal but I thought the AI was pretty bad as well. I didn't find the big monster in the demo scary at all. Sure it was a little unsettling at first but I was able to just hide behind a pillar or something and just walk around the pillar so the monster didn't see me and then stealth away. I never felt like I was in danger. When I later got the ice/goo gun I just iced the monster and hit it with the wrench till it died. After recently having replayed Alien: Isolation the monster in Prey didn't seem that threatening.

Wait ? What ? You can't have Prey (2017) and Prey (2006) installed at the same time in Steam ? That is crazy.....

Huh, that's a weird comment from Brad then, has the game *ever* been on Steam or did he confuse it with something else?

[edit: He might've meant just the install dir for the original game if you got it for pc, since it is available on windows]

I literally did a double-take when I heard Ben's voice. I've missed that guy so much, glad to hear him again.

@cyberspacecat: It used to be on Steam but was delisted some time ago, so there will be ppl with 2006 Prey in their libraries and they should have been accounted for

I've only watched this QL, but this game seems really generic.

I love it when you can see parts of the toolkit the game has in common with other games the same studio has developed. When Brad grabs the nerf darts, that is totally the same animation most things you grab have in Dishonored.

You can have both Preys installed at the same time via Steam (I know, I do), but they do both install to the exact same directory if you install both to the same drive. It's really bizarre, and seems like something Valve should definitely not allow, but it doesn't seem like there are any file conflicts so far and both seem to launch and run just fine. Incidentally, both Preys have identical names in my Steam library as well. Should've called the new one "PREY" or something.

@orion1189: Hmm interesting...I guess that isn't too bad then. It just highlights the crazy trend of remaking games with exact same name. Need for Speed, Battlefront and now Prey...there are probably many more. I just dont get it...new game, new name imo

I played the demo on Xbox One. The frame-rate was pretty rough, and the combat seemed pretty bad. The character designs also feel like they were left over from Dishonored kind of? The blaring combat music when nothing was on screen was also infuriating. The music during the introductory helicopter ride was amazing at least. Much more synth-y and vibrant than I expected, which makes me think the early trailers for the game aren't quite indicative of the tone the game has going for it.

I have a really hard time passing up really good PC games and although I have a massive backlog of which I will probably never conquer I just had to pick this up at $40.

I haven't played super far into it but they do some things that are just absolutely phenomenal graphically and I'm looking forward to getting farther into it. I don't know if it is really my type of game since as much as I enjoyed System Shock back in the day swinging a wrench and managing inventory isn't really my thing but I saw enough positive opinions of this game and the fact that it branches in many ways story wise/progression wise depending on choices you make that I decided to give it a shot.

Also that glue gun is super great.

@coffinvarnishh: Just picked it up on Redbox, and yes, it still controls like garbage, didn't go back and try the demo again, but it's enough that I don't want to play it on PS4. I'm going to spring for the PC version once the price drops.

Also, I don't understand why it controls the way it does. Talos Principle on PS4 has exceptionally smooth FPS controls, and this is presumably running on a very similar engine, if not the same one entirely. It's not just the aiming that has input lag, but the movement stick makes you feel like you're moving through molasses. It's the most basic means of interacting with the game, you done fucked up when you get that wrong.

The helicopter ride isn't what you think it is