Prey - Review

Happy New Year!  Can you believe it's 2018 already?  Last year was a good year, personally, professionally and gamelly (yeah, I know that's not a real word).  I ended last year having played forty-two games, thirty-nine of them completed.  Project X Zone 2 on 3DS I am still playing and really enjoying, and have no doubt I will finish later this year.  There were two games I walked away from last year, The End Is Nigh and Resonance of Fate.  The former started out really fun and challenging, but after getting to the point where it seemed the game was going to end the developers piled on a load more levels.   This would normally be a good thing, but the difficulty level spiked too much and stopped being fun.  The latter, well it was intriguing, with some really original concepts, but near the end of the game after I had put in sixty hours it became apparent that to complete it I would need to put in at minimal another twenty hours.  I bowed out, it had become about finishing the game rather than enjoying playing it.


Anyway enough about 2017, let's talk about Prey, wait when was that released?  When it was announced I was a little skeptically about playing it, why you ask?  Back in 2006 Prey was released, I really enjoyed it and was looking forward to playing the sequel.  Unfortunately, the plug was pulled and there never was a Prey 2.    When I read about the new Prey I found it did not resemble the original Prey at all and I promptly lost interest.  Luckily enough my main man DG told me a lot about the game and he encouraged me to play it.


I find calzone's to be highly underrated, which is a shame as they can be really nice.  One could argue that they are simply a folded pizza, and it would be hard to disagree with that assessment, but to me they are more than just that.  On the outside, they look simple, unassuming, but when you take a bite you can't believe what you have been missing out on.  The cheese seems more cheesy and the tomato seems more, well you get the point.  Playing Prey I found myself asking, was there something tasty inside or was it just a poor imitation of a pizza?

Story

The game's protagonist is Morgan Yu, you wake up in your apartment and your brother Alex calls letting you know how happy he is that you will be working with him.  Get up, go to work, rinse, repeat, everything's normal, or is it?  Very quickly things become dark and confusing, not knowing what to do or who trust.  Being honest saying any more than that will spoil the main story.


The game offers multiple side quests some of which directly affect the main story, for the most part, you won't know which ones these are, so try not to skip too many of them.   Some of the side quests were really interesting as they offered insight into the world you were in, especially the social aspects.


Overall the main story was pretty good, if not slightly drawn out near the end.  The side quests give depth to the characters in the world and really makes you care about them, well some of them anyway.

Visuals

The game looks really sharp, so much so that when Morgan initially wakes up I thought it was a cut sequence.  The world reminded me of a nice hotel or a cruise ship, well except for the darkness and death that is.  There are parts later in the game where you have the opportunity to float around in space which is not only fun to do but looks really cool as well.  The enemies are interesting and terrifying, at least initially until you get used to seeing them.  One of my favourite things visually was watching the Recycler at work, changing weapons, food, scrap into more workable building blocks.


While the game does look sharp I found it difficult to pull out areas that really stood out.  It is inaccurate to say it looked boring but considering the backdrop I thought it would have been more exciting.



Music

The music and sounds of Prey can be best described as intense, even when you think you are safe it reminds you otherwise.  In many games when enemies appear music plays and then when you kill them it stops, not in Prey.  This is done really well and has you constantly at the edge of your seat, along with making you ask the question, 'are there more enemies?'  There were a number of people who helped create this terrifying score:


Mick Gordon, an Australian composer who has worked on a number of diverse game titles including; Wolfenstein: The New Order, Doom (2016) ShootMania Storm, Killer Instinct and Need for Speed: The Run.

Ben Crossbones, an American composer who works include;  Organ Trail, Skate or Die, Tony Hawks Pro Skater HD and Kick-Ass.

Raphael Colantonio, French game designer and founder of Arkane Studios who brought us the Dishonored series.  Outside of this he also performed the track 'Brigmore Lullaby' in Dishonored 2.

Matt Piersall, an America composer and audio director for GL33k, some of his works include;  Epic Mickey, Full Metal Alchemist and The Broken Angel, Splosion Man, Halo 4, Metroid Prime 3 and Recore.


The score lasts little over thirty minutes, it's filled with dread, darkness and really only exists for one reason, to let you know you are never safe.  The atmosphere it helps create really made the gameplay itself that much more enjoyable.  My favourite pieces were; 'The Phantoms', 'Neuromods', 'No Gravity' and 'December and January'.

Gameplay


Onto the meat!  The first thing that gave me pause when I was about to embark on my journey were the difficulty options and their descriptions.  Easy, 'You will survive. Probably' and Nightmare, 'Nothing Can Save You'.  I really liked that touch, games like Doom and Duke Nukem have a tendency to do the same thing.


Nobody likes tutorials but they are necessary to get you up and running.  Some games try to make them interesting, others do not.  Prey is definitely the latter, it felt like a tutorial from the nineties and it's only saving grace was the personality questionnaire at the end.


The game is a first person shooter style and as such that means there are a number of weapons of your disposal.  My favourite weapon for the first few hours of playing was the turret, if I found one I carried everywhere as my protector.  The Gloo gun was a stand out weapon that was not only used to remove hazards but could be also used to reach inaccessible areas and stop enemies in there tracks. The Golden Silenced Pistol and the shotgun were my go to weapons and upgrading them certainly helped.  Need more materials?  Don't worry you can you use Recycler grenades, through them into an area with lots of stuff in it and boom instant conversion - very handy to remove obstacles too.

Nothing is safe to pick up.  When is a health kit not a health kit?  When it's a mimic.  These enemies throughout the game made me jump many times even when I knew they were there.  They will jump right at your face and if you are not careful it will mean your demise.  There is a creature you encounter later called the Nightmare, it's exactly what it sounds like.  You have the choice to hide until it passes by or kill it, at least early on I would recommend the hide and pray option.


There are no shops to sell things but there is a genius invention called the Recycler.  It take anything you dont' want and converts it into one of four materials; mineral, exotic, organic, synthetic.  These materials can then be used in a Fabricator to create anything you might need, and trust me you will call on the both many, many times through out the game.


The skill tree is pretty standard until later in the game where you have access to many unusual abilities.  There is no levelling up system so you will need to collect or fabricate neuromods which are used to purchase them.  While there were many good abilities I found myself sticking to the same reliable few.  Initially I thought this was due to laziness on my part, but then I realised there were many that just were not that worthwhile.  One of the most frustrating abilities was hacking, not the ability itself but the annoying mini game you had to do each time you wanted to do it.  Anything outside a level one hack was painful, lucky enough in most cases there was a way round this.


Overall some pretty good gameplay with few complaints apart from hacking and a some so so abilities.




Final Thoughts

So after just over thirty hours how did I feel?  Pretty good.  The story was interesting and only near the end did I find it to be a little drawn.  The game looked sharp visually even if it wasn't very standout.  Musically the game was right on the money and really helped intensify the gameplay.  The gameplay itself was fairly solid with a few minor exceptions.  Overall I would have to say this calzone was pretty tasty and give it 4 out of 5