My review of Prey

Imagine you're playing a run-of-the-mill FPS. Now imagine you just did a good dose of LSD. Add in some portals, gravity puzzles, aliens, spirits, and a stellar storyline, and you have the basics of Prey, easily one of the five best FPS games on the 360.

You play Tommy, a twentysomething Cherokee who resents his life. You can't bring yourself to confess your love for your girlfriend Jenny, and you barely care about your Cherokee roots. The game starts with you staring into the bathroom mirror in Jenny's bar, insulting yourself, and one of my biggest pet peeves in video games shows itself right away. Despite the fact you can clearly see your feet in the reflection, you can't see them when looking down. But since Halo and Mirror's Edge are the only two first-person games I've played that let you see your feet, I'd be a jackass to hate the game for it.

You leave the bathroom, and you're confronted by your grandfather, who talks to you for a good 3-5 minutes before you can pass him. Once you pass him, you dick around in the bar for a while, probably earning 3 achievements by playing respective games in the arcade area. By this point, it's about 30 minutes after you first put the game in, and nothing of note has happened. It's a very slow start, one that would turn a casual gamer off of the game entirely.

However, the monotony breaks when you club two drunks to death for advancing on your girlfriend too vigorously, and then randomly get abducted by aliens. You get separated from your girlfriend and grandfather, and the game begins. All you have is a wrench you picked up at the bar, and you use this to kill various aliens, and pick up their guns. You're also introduced to several gravity mechanics, like a switch that reverses gravity when you shoot it, and a pathway that bends gravity so you can walk on it upside-down and not fall off.

None of this is explained to you, and while this feels like a cop-out on the developers' part, it actually helps to create a very organic experience. You feel exactly like you would if you just got abducted - lost in a strange place, forced to experiment with whatever you find to attempt to make sense of your situation.

Eventually, you find your grandfather, as he's trapped in a huge vice. Seconds later, he gets crushed to death. You continue onwards to try to find Jenny, and soon, your grandfather's spirit comes down to guide you. He brings you to Cherokee heaven, where he teaches you the power of spirit walking. Basically, you can bring your spirit out of your body and use it to go through force fields and operate switches.

While this is a very interesting set up to what becomes a theme to puzzles and the like, about 50% of the time you'll have to use spirit walk for the following scenario: You come across a force field. Spirit walk. Walk through the force field, hit a switch that's right there to shut it off, return to your body, continue on with the game. It gets tiring, but it has to be done to keep the mechanic in your mind. Otherwise, you'd come across a fantastic puzzle once every two chapters, and spirit walking wouldn't be an obvious solution.

Shortly after, you'll find the second power your grandfather helped you with. Every time you die, your soul gets transported to a spirit world, where the spirits of your slain enemies fly around you, and you're tasked with shooting them to revive your health. After a while, you get transported into your revived body, exactly where it was, but with more health. Since there's no penalty for dying, you get careless and do it a lot, which makes the game drag because you're forced to shoot birds for 30 seconds every time. While the obvious solution is to not die, it's just a bad idea to make the game less fun if the player sucks.

As you play on, the scope of the game gets bigger, employing spaceships and miles-long areas for each puzzle. While it serves to build the game very well, after a while, you start to grow a little tired of it. At this point, playing any other game, you would stop wanting to play. But Prey's storyline makes you want to suffer through the puzzles, find Jenny, and get home. Again, it stays very true-to-life, you feel exactly what you would feel if you were Tommy. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the plot and gameplay alternate their roles beautifully throughout the game. The game keeps you hooked in using one or the other throughout the duration.

Prey looks like a game that came out on the original Xbox, but I've never let graphics bother me. Also, I just can't shake the feeling that 3D Realms lucked out massively. The complete lack of direction in the game could've just been bad developing, and the fact I was always able to find my way through the puzzles could've been a mixture of lucky design and me making the right choices on the first go. Regardless, this is a game I thorougly enjoyed playing. It's an easy 1000, and a used copy only cost me 8 bucks. Anyone who hasn't played this 3-year-old game should. Immediately.