Prey, an uncanny, scary, atmospheric FPS involving a juxtaposition of aliens and Native Americans. The game starts out presenting our hero, Tommy, a jaded and disillusioned Cherokee boy (young man really) trying to break free of the Reservation. It’s steeped in every pop culture Native American cliché that we could think of, and then some. Suddenly, aliens attack. They start sucking up cars, people, the bar he works in, into this weirdly convoluted ship that is traversed via a bizarre network of space-warping portals. The best parts about this game happen to be some of the humor. Once and a while, wandering about, you come across a panel on the wall that is currently receiving radio from Earth—and it happens to be Art Bell. Callers continually complain about various strange happenings, lights, and other events involved with the alien attack and he does his best not to believe them.
The biggest problem we had with Prey is that it was amazingly short. The death mechanic is interesting—when you die you are thrust into the alternate world of your ancestors where you fight the dishonored dead—of course, this makes short work of dying over and over because you come back, whilst your foes do not. It doesn’t have enough replay value to go back in with a more difficult setting.
The best things about this are the weird varieties of puzzles that present themselves from the space-warping qualities of the ship. Sadly, the game just does not go far enough with those puzzles. The most intriguing part was a labyrinth of wall-walking-gravity-conveyors, but it didn’t end up lasting that long.
High point? Discovering that the aliens were apparently the doom of the Anasazi causing them to totally vanish so long ago (not that we haven’t seen that plot before…) We laughed, we cried, we kicked alien butt in the name of our ancestors.
I have had the misfortune of watching my fiance play this game. It was bad. Trite, cliche and soooooo very very lame.
Umm, but … one could kick massive alien butt, so I guess it does have at least one redeeming quality. Except, eh, I wasn’t interested in that.
I haven’t been this uninterested in and dissapointed by an alien game since ET for the Atari.
Alright, I’ll admit having Art Bell might almost make it worth trying. It *is* Art Bell after all.