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Prey Review
- Title: Prey
- Publisher: 2K Games
- Developer: Human Head Studios
- System: PC (360)
Instead of the protagonist's racial background being a footnote, or something you only find in the manual, Human Head brings a version of Native American spirituality to the fore by tying it directly into gameplay elements. Tough-guy Tommy doesn't believe in 'that crap' when the game starts, but soon enough he's leaving his body to walk about as a being of pure spirit (which comes in mighty handy around auto-turrets). This 'out of body' experience means that, for all intents and purposes, Tommy can't die. When you do deplete your health bar, instead of reloading the game you're taken to a grim-looking plateau and given the chance to fight for your life. Your spirit-bow is quite adept at taking out the bad spirits surrounding the place, and every one you destroy returns a little health or spirit energy. After a set time span, you're sucked back down and out into the living world to face your foes again. It was great not having to worry about saving and reloading, but after the third or fourth time the simple shoot-the-spirits game got a little old. It would have been great if the spirit world had become a tougher place further into the game. And while the occasional chat with your dead grandfather was enjoyable from a plot perspective, the lack of gameyness to your trips into ancient New Mexico disappointed. The designers took us on an in-game spiritual journey, but there was very little to actually 'do' as that journey progressed.
While there are spirits in the game, most of the shiny comes from alien technology. Portals are a great tweak to time and space, and already look like they're going to be a permanent fixture in FPS gaming. Opponents and some simple switches can throw open oval passageways to 'someplace else'. Not just a loading gimmick or gag, the portals physically link areas that are otherwise inaccessible. Early in the game they do a bit of showing off by walking you past a glass box with a small rock in it. You're left wondering what exactly it is, as it has no obvious purpose. Just a few moments later, though, you're stepping through a portal onto a rocky spheroid inside a glassy enclosure. It's a cheap trick, but effective at getting across the technology's potential. The gravity flipping trick is a more straightforward puzzle element, requiring you to alternate the orientation of 'down' in order to gain access to various surfaces in a room. In most cases it's fairly simple to see what's going on, but there are several great Escher-esque moments that require you to exercise your three dimensional thinking skills. The 'undying protagonist', gravity-flipping, and already adopted-portals are all great gimmicks, and I find myself actually hoping that I'll be seeing copycat game mechanics in future FPS titles.
Unfortunately, the overall vision of the game falls somewhat short of the greatness it was striving for. The techno-organic (read: drawn on a trapper-keeper) motif that your surroundings and enemies display begins to look exactly like every other game made with the Doom 3 engine after you've killed your tenth identical bad guy. So far, every game we've seen made with this technology have been visually arresting, but more or less artistically bankrupt. Prey, at least, takes the gooey look to its fullest; many of your weapons are actually alive, and some were formerly pieces of enemies. As you're walking along, your weapon might hiss at you menacingly. This little touch is so clever and appreciated that it makes the boring sameness of the enemies and corridors that much more drab.
Even more frustrating is the ease with which most veteran FPS players will complete this title on 'Regular' mode. There's a solid fifteen hours or so of gameplay here, but for the first half of the game you're probably going to find yourself trying to remember what the spirit world looks like. The second half is more challenging, but only at a level the first half should have ramped up to. That said, I would far and away rather games be too easy than too hard; it's a lot of fun to finish a game and I think a lot of modern titles don't keep that in mind when gauging difficulty. The challenge level felt as though they were purposefully teaching you as you went; the integration of new elements into your knowledge of the game world was accomplished at a brisk but digestible pace. Just the same, once the game really got rocking I found myself hoping for more intelligent baddies to fight; not every bad guy can be from F.E.A.R., I guess.
Visually, Prey acquits itself well against its contemporaries. The Doom 3 engine is still a solid platform to wrap a game around, and the dark-n-moody atmosphere it fosters was fairly appropriate considering the setting. The 'generic alien squishiness' did get old after a while, though. Even more annoyingly, the alien designs felt uninspired on first brush and just kept hanging around throughout the game. There just aren't that many types of baddies to face in this title. While I'm not looking for a menagerie to start hunting me down, I would have liked a little more variety; the ground-level grunt was particularly boring. The spiritual children, at least, were interesting from a background standpoint. Encountered in a few choice areas, their creepy appearance and haunting laughter was one of the few genuine chill-inducing elements of the game. Aurally, there wasn't much beyond those laughing children to look forward to. Forgettable music and fairly standard moans and groans from your enemies dog your steps through the game. Weapons sounds were serviceable; while not anything amazing, they did lend a passable feeling of weight and power to your arsenal. My favorite audio element was actually the occasionally overheard snippets of radio broadcasts from Earth. Quiet moments could be spent preparing for your next run by listening to (real-life radio host) Art Bell receive calls from bewildered humans experiencing the alien invasion on the ground. The only real humour in the game, the vignettes were well written and produced, and well worth the time it took to listen.
Prey, with its retro-inspired corridor shooting and tired alien antagonists, could have fallen victim to retread gameplay and genre boredom. Instead, Human Head has managed to lift the simple shooter out of mundanity by give us some new things to see and do while we're mowing down generic baddies. A serviceable plot and a spiritual twist, on top of new-tech portals and gravity flipping, is just enough to make everything old seem somehow a little bit new. The 'classic' shooter is something I'm starting to get tired of, but with Prey at least one more title has made aiming and shooting fun enough to recommend. If you're a fan of the FPS genre, especially the early work of id software, you're going to have fun with the new toys given to us by Human Head Studios.
From the summary: They are a combination table-top gaming and computer gaming studio, and their completion of Prey some nine years after it was first shown to the gaming press is nothing short of extraordinary.
SWG was developed in that time frame...granted, it sucked - but still, it was a persistent, complex MMORPG. It takes 9 years to develop a first person shooter? Really??
Prey was fun to play. It would have been much much better if there was some variation. Those aliens visited various planets to harvest, but nothing of the alien planets were encountered in the games. It's was the same bio-tech space ship every level.
Another things that was to bad was the lack of the indian trials, it was about to become interested to perform those trials. But it never happened.
The voice acting and characterization are really strong in this game, and these elements really help to bring credibility and immersiveness to the experience. In a genre of famously mute protagonists it's really nice to BE such an expressive guy for once.
Play the demo and you'll see what I mean. You'll agree with me 110% when you hear him say "Nasty!" near the beginning!
http://gamingexcellence.com/xbox360/games/400/revi ew.shtml
"That said, I would far and away rather games be too easy than too hard;"
Um where I'm from, the harder a game is the *better* it is. I read that line and the one about 15 hours of gameplay and thought, wow.. this is why i dont play offline games. I was going to download this game even, on account of the trailers, but now im not so sure. What kind of game reviewer thinks that a game being easy is a positive point? Easy to understand, easy to get the hang of sure, but easy puzzles? easy fighting? sounds lame to me. Easy is for n00bs.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Man, it seems like there should be a fairly easy fix for that. Every time you respawn, you respawn next to your team-mate (pretty standard) and the game should have a mechanic where you can press a key and warp to the position of your team-mate at any time. It seems like this would be decently easy to introduce -- especially in a sci-fi universe -- without losing much credibility.
I rather enjoyed the multiplayer. It's rather fun to go into spirit mode and score some cheap shots against someone before they manage to knock you back into the real world... but you gotta hide your body, because it's easy for others to hear it when you're in spirit mode (I seemed to have a knack for finding my opponent trying to hide this way).
The sunbeam weapon (read: the weapon that sucks in those balls of the walls, with the "light" balls) is fun to wield, but also sucks to be killed with (it's equivalent to that gun in Half-Life 1 that uses the nuclear energy packs and goes WHIIIIIR... forgot what it's called :( oh well).
Portals are fun too, especially since you can wedge yourself BEHIND some (others can still figure out you're there because the portal is open) and fire through where the portal is with most weapons. Hehehe.
While co-op mode in corridor shooters is indeed dead as 8-track tape, the co-op multiplayer is now getting some kind of return to fashion in family oriented games. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "Narnia" are good examples of games with EXCELLENT co-op multiplayer (it's developed to a level in which single player can be annoying in some levels - you can just see that they were designed with two or more human players in mind).
I feel you pain because I was always a co-op multiplayer fan. We just feel the squeeze of the invisible hand of the market on our cojones (to quote Stephenson's "Confusion"). The market has decided that "Quake 3"-like multiplayer games are what the public wants, so there's no more common exploration of dark corridors.
Prey is one of the better FPS games to come out recently. Unfortunately that's like saying someone is the best ukelele player in Fargo.
We've seen just about every possible variation there is to the FPS theme, and the portal bit helps make Prey different, but what we don't really have is a game that really draws people in. The original Half Life did that. HL2 also did well in that regard. The problem is with the real lack of innovation in the genre - at the core the difference between Prey and every other alien shoot-em-up is a few tweaks in gameplay mechanics.
The FPS genre is starting to get played out, and while Prey is a noble effort, it just isn't enough. The AI just isn't challenging enough, and the portals and other gameplay additions keep the game from being a failure, but they're not enough to make it memorable.
I wish I had some magic solution for what would renovate the FPS genre, but I really don't. Better AI would certainly help, and more interesting art direction would also differentiate games from each other (why does every game that uses the Doom 3 engine look the same?). FPS titles seem to be losing their "spark" and maybe some creative title will create a new wave of innovation in the genre, and while Prey makes an admirable attempt to bring some new life into the genre, what makes it innovative tends to get overwhelmed by what makes it look and play like every other title in the genre.
Perfect Dark Zero offers an excellent online coop mode. It's probably the most innovative part of the game, but didn't get a lot of fanfare.
In a lot of ways it's much better than the flawed single-player mode.
Or even easier, make it an actual challenge and once a team mate dies, they are gone until the next stage. That would make it all the more important for the players to work as a team instead of running for powerups all the time.
If unlimited respawns were introduced, the game would be way to easy.
I got nothin'
Then when the first player dies, he respawns back by the second player. Lather, rinse, repeat until you make it through. For casual gamers this is a great feature!
A "great feature" like that would only be appreciated by idiotic players not casual players.
I don't know what kind of player you are, but suggesting that -any- sort of player would consider a game that encourages them to perform tedious borderline exploit tactics to beat the game a "great feature" isn't thinking straight.
A "great feature" for casual players is multiple difficulty levels so they can play the game at a challenge level that matches their skill. A "great feature" for casual players is the ability to pause and save anywhere so they can leave and go do something else without losing their progress.
Its true that games that allow unlimited saves anywhere DO allow players to respawn crawl through levels, but players rarely ENJOY playing like that, and I can't think of a single person I've ever met who, when they felt "compelled" to respawn crawl, thought it was a "great feature". Every single one of them thought it was a STUPID and UN-FUN way to play the game, and the only reason they did it was that restarting the level over from the beginning over and over and over was deemed even STUPIDER and more UN-FUN.
A game that allows save-anywhere should be designed to discourage the "respawn crawl" playstyle. Seriously, what sort of idiot would WANT to play games like that?
One way of discouraging it is to limit saves per level per session so that you can save if you need to go, but can't save after every room unless you want to quit and re-open the game every couple deaths. Another way is to put a time limit between saves... you can save anytime, anywhere, but once you've saved, you can't save again until either 10 minutes have passed or you cross an auto-save checkpoint. Yet another way is to allow the player to change the difficulty between deaths -- if he's 10 hours into a 15 hour game on "Hard", and he was doing fine, but as he got deeper the game got harder to the point that he's now dying every other room - give him the option to drop the difficulty a notch.
Adding this choice gives the player a more attractive option than the three he's currently faced with: a) restarting the game at a lower difficulty which would be exceedingly boring - to play through the 10 hours you already beat on an -easier- setting (yawn), or b) continue forward banging your head on the wall because you can make virtually no progress at all and you have to keep playing the same part of the same level over and over and over again (double yawn), or using respawn-crawl to inch through, which is both boring AND lame.
Sure, being in an international competition is exciting but it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the game itself. It has to do with the high and the pressure of a competition of that nature. None of this has anything to do with the innovation level of FPSs. Halo is a huge innovative leap from quake. There's simply no conparison between the two. Halo is brilliant. I loved every minute of it whether I played single or multiplayer and I've played every FPS game worth mentioning since Wolfenstein.
You need to learn to separate the *feeling* of the good ol' days when you were doing international competitions and now (which is probably jack shit). Seriously, you need deep psycological counceling if you really think there's been no innovation in the FPS genre.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
From your post it comes across that what you enjoy is not the game (football or a computer one) but the competition. While that is as valid a way of enjoying oneself as any; it is not necessarily one that all people will enjoy. A large number of people enjoy games only in a non competitive settings.