Prey (2017) – Review

*Spoiler Free*

Not to be confused with the Xbox 360 game ‘Prey’ that came out in 2006, which followed a native American Indian as he is abducted by aliens and must use his Cherokee spirit powers to help him escape, this Prey (or Prey 2017) is apparently a re-imagining of the above game that has sweet F-A to do with it. Other than the fact that there are aliens featured in it (and not even the same aliens), and possibly due to the fact the game is a First Person Shooter, the developers may as well given it a whole new title and created an entirely new IP, rather than throwing on the same title from a previous semi-unrelated game and avoided confusing the hell out of all of us. I mean Prey (2006) wasn’t even that popular of a game as far as I am aware. I don’t seem to remember much buzz about it after it had launched. I have read the classic story of the infamous Prey sequel that went through development hell before eventually being scrapped. That was apparently supposed to be a true sequel to the 2006 title before it was scrapped and Bethesda Software (of Fallout and Elder Scrolls fame) acquired the rights to the game. I mean the game isn’t even created or published by the same studios and development teams, so I must ask, why even bother calling it Prey?

Anyway enough of the name. It really doesn’t matter, I suppose. You can give a game the worst title in the world, but so long as the gameplay is good, what does it matter? And for Prey, the gameplay is good, really good in fact. I have just finished it and I really did have a lot of fun throughout it. I was eager to jump back on and play some more whenever I could.
Maybe it was because Prey came on the heels of my Mass Effect: Andromeda run-through, and after being incredibly disappointed and relatively bored with that game, I was an easy target for Prey. It must have been like shooting fish in a barrel.

Let me just say that I am a bit of a sucker for Bioshock games. I have done all of them and really enjoyed them, even the second one where the story absolutely sucked but the gameplay was solid and allowed you to weld both special powers and guns at the same time, so it had really learned from the original and fixed various gameplay issues that people had.
The reason I mention this is because Prey feels like a Bioshock game. If it had been released after Bioshock 2, I would have said that it was just Bioshock set in space, but with Bioshock: Infinite, and they did the same story but set in a completely different location (in the sky this time), I realised that you can pretty much take the Bioshock setting and stick in anywhere.
Bioshock set in space you say? Didn’t they already do that? Oh yes! Systemshock! Actually scrap everything I just said above, Prey feels like Systemshock (Bioshock’s hard to live up to father). Where we haven’t had a Systemshock for years (hint hint EA), the gameplay of Prey feels more like Bioshocks because of the newer style of controls and, of course, the graphics.
So my point of this is that if you have played/enjoyed any Bioshock game or the Systemshock games, then you will instantly feel comfortable with Prey.
That was the key with me. As soon as I got a weapon and had free roam of the space station, in which the game is set on (I’ll cover in a moment), I instantly felt at home with it. It was a solid tried and tested way of gaming, with enough new stuff thrown in to make it their own. As I said I am a big fan of the Bioshock games, so this was comfortable for me.
The biggest similarity to System/Bioshock is that Prey is an FPS where your first weapon is a wrench. The game features picking up every item you can find, gaining special powers, unique weapons, hacking, and learning most of the story through audio-logs. So you can see why I feel right at home with this game after previously playing and absorbing myself into the Bioshock series.

The game follows either a female protagonist or a male (chosen right at the beginning, so I had actually forgotten that this was a choice in the game). I chose a male on so you will have to forgive me if I keep referring to the main character as Morgan, and you clearly played through Prey as a female. Morgan is a silent protagonist from the days when developers wanted players to portray themselves when playing, despite the fact every other character refers to you as a different name, which kind of defeats the purpose of it. It is kind of a relic of the old world and I personally prefer my protagonist to be a character themselves.

Now this is stepping into spoiler territory of the first twenty minutes of the game, with my point to follow, so if you want to skip this section then just go to the next paragraph.
So you play as Morgan Yu, who wakes up in his apartment and is instructed to go to his first day of work. You search through the cupboards and pick up random items you have no idea what to use them for, and head off to the roof. From there you take a helicopter to your new office (through an impressive looking city – graphic wise, completely with a beautiful backdrop and lighting effects) and you head to work where you begin a strange training/test exercise.
A disguised alien (which we will touch on in a bit) springs its attack on the examiner and you suddenly wake up again in your apartment and receive the same telephone call. Everything is repeated only this time something is wrong. People he has passed in the hallway previously are now dead and the helicopter was nothing but a remote controlled ride. Morgan soon realises that it was all actually an enormous simulation and you are on-board a huge Space Station called the Talos-1.
Now the reason I am going into so much detail into this is because I am not sure why the hell this part of the game was even put in. It is quite cool discovering that the beginning of the game was nothing but a simulation, but it serves no purpose what-so-ever to the story. After this the game gets on track and the story continues on a set path throughout the rest of the game, but this introduction feels so random, almost as if someone had a really cool idea, but by then the game was pretty much already planned out, so they thought they would throw this in anyway for a laugh.
Prey is a very simple story, at least after this section, and then gets a little more difficult towards the end, but that is okay. Players need to be eased into things. If you give them too much at the start, then this throws them off and it takes them quite a while to catch up.
Going back to Bioshock, the game begins and you have had a plane crash in the ocean. You swim to a lighthouse and take a mysterious lift down to what appears to be a mutant overrun city. It is only after playing the game for a few hours that you discover so much more and after that the twists and plot reveals begin to occur. Having one so early in Prey is confusing, especially since it really doesn’t serve the plot at all. It is really just a cool idea that has been shoe-horned in, and it feels like it.

So the only points to get from the above was that you are on-board a large Space Station called the Talos-1. You discover that the station has had some kind of outbreak of a strange alien lifeforms called the Typhon. It is clear that some experiments were occurring and something has gone horribly wrong. Everyone is dead… and I mean everyone! You don’t meet another human for at least four-five hours into the game, and even then they are locked in a cell. Eventually, towards the end of the game, more humans begin to come out of hiding, but the thing with Prey is that you have so much choice in this game, you can choose to kill all of the humans if you wish (a feature which I would like to go back and do just to see how much it would change the game).

There are two main types of enemies, and then a few others that pop up now and again. The first main one are the Mimics. These buggers can change themselves into any object in this game. Since Prey allows you to pick up absolutely anything that isn’t nailed down, loads of objects and items have been brilliantly rendered, allowing you to see them all up close in 360 degrees. These Mimics can change into any of them. Most of the time (at least for the first two thirds of the game) these creatures are hiding and waiting to spring their trap. You go over to an object and interact with it, only for it to transform and attack. Which can be quite jumpy at times and does put you on edge for the first chunk of the game, as you never know which item would be a Mimic, so you will also approach with caution.
A few times I went to an object to notice it hop slightly, almost as if the game was bugging out. I have seen this many times before in games where the items on shelves can be knocked about and fly everywhere during explosions and action sections, such as Skyrim and Half-Life 2, so when I saw the item hop I instantly thought that the game was being a bit buggy, only for the object to suddenly transform into this spider-esc alien and begin attacking me. As you can tell, this made me jump even more.
The Mimic will then either continue attacking (and the best way to deal with them is to use the wrench, as shooting just uses so many bullets that don’t hit, until later in the game when you are a bit more tooled up, so you find yourself just aimlessly swinging the wrench around at the floor, getting disorientated half the time and occasionally hitting it. Which is not the greatest of gameplay), or they will run off around a corner and turn into something else nearby, repeating the cycle unless you have marked the target (Pro Tip! Use the zoom in/scan button to mark enemies). This whole scenario was well done and never felt as if it was being milked. Whenever you had a constant flow of Mimics, the game would make you do something else and you would end up forgetting about them, setting you up for another jump scare when it happens again.

The other main enemy in the game are the Phantoms, which come in a variety of different flavours and all sport different attacks and require different weapons and tactics in order to defeat them. It took me a little while to work out that these were actually dead bodies completely taken over by the Typhon, as at first they look like strange humanoid shadows. But it was only when I listened to what they were saying, that I actually realised there was so much more to them. So it was a really nice touch.
There are quite a few other enemies in the game, but these are mainly reserved for set part of the game, but I’ll leave that for when you play it.
I will give a mention to one other enemy. This one is called the Nightmare and it is bloody massive. At about the halfway point in the game you receive a ticking clock saying “Evade or kill the Nightmare” with about two minutes on it. Now I had no previous warning to what this ‘Nightmare’ was so I was absolutely terrified. This was a great addition to the game and one that I will not go into in this review, but I will say (another Pro Tip!), when you get the side mission to find something that can repel it, then do it!

That is one thing I have not touched on yet, the side missions and game structure. So after the initial starting section of the game, which appears quite linear and gives you the impression that the game is going to be like this all the way through it, you suddenly come to the Talos-1 lobby and realise that you are free to go wherever you like… only you can’t because everywhere is locked. Well after about halfway through the game you are free to go back and forth begin places, in fact if you are just following the main story mission then you will have to go back to a few places, but most of the time I was eager to complete some of the side missions I had acquired in the first half of the game, and so I would happily return to previous locations. Most of the time I had picked up a key card or a code that now opened a locked door in a part of the station I had already been to in the story mission related to it. You see sometimes you can actually get into a locked room multiple different ways. There might be an air vent or a service tunnel nearby, or you have to use the games most unique weapon (the Glue Gun – coming soon) in order to create a staircase to a broken window or destroyed section of wall to enter.
One time I could either wait for a floating robot (called an operator, which come in a few different varieties and either help you (in attacking or healing you) or are enemies themselves) to open the door as it ran its pre-set routine linked with the in-game clock (so waiting half hour in the in-game time), or you can do what I did, which was use the little Nerf-gun weapon, from a broken window, to hit the door release button. It was a great moment when I realised I could do this and when it actually worked.
So my point is that the game does a good job of making you really check over a location for an alternative way inside a locked door or area before moving on (in which case it will be a code or a key card you will find later that opens it).
You can also sometimes hack the door (levelling up your hacking skill allows you to open up high security levelled terminals and doors, as well as the hostile operators and turrets), which involves a little mini-game where you must move through a maze to reach a target, not hitting the red walls otherwise you will be stunned for a few moments and run the risk of running out of time. Although you’d think the higher security hacks would be harder, I found that level two ones are the hardest, and the level four ones you have enough time to swan about in the maze with ease before finally deciding when to activate it, if the time is right with you. I must admit the mini-game was quite fun to do and you do not need a special tool or item to do it, nor do you lose anything for trying (other than a little bit of health if you fail) so just go for it.

So as I said you pick up side missions along the way. These include things such as getting into a location, finding a secret stash, helping a fellow survivor, and many more. One type that I really did enjoy was when the game asked me to look for a specific person. Normally you are greeted by an objective marker for that mission which you can toggle on and off, which differs from the main objective/s marker, but with this type of side mission, you had nothing. I thought to myself “Well am I suppose to just run into this person (or corpse really as at that point in the game, every person is normally just a corpse you’ve salvaged, all complete with their own personal name) on my travels?” But then I remembered that I can look at the employee directory on any security terminal and select them, creating a map marker based on their employee tracking device. It was another proud moment when I discovered this. You can actually find every employee on-board Talos-1, and there is even an achievement for doing so. By the end the game, I had found well over 80% of them. It was kind of a shame for me not to go back and find the rest, but I’ll speak more on that later.

For doing these side missions, and exploring in general, you are mainly rewarded with Neuromods. These are effectively skill points you use to level up Morgan. At first you only have access to human based powers, such as increasing your health, stamina, your hacking ability, sneaking skill, or your ability to upgrade weapons, to name a few skills, but eventually you get the chance to get Typhon powers as well, and this is where the game gets interesting. With Prey, you can play this game quite stealthily. As enemies re-spawn in areas you haven’t been to in a while, and resources can sometimes be quite sparse, so the game does encourage you to play sometimes stealthily, hiding from enemies under tables and using the LB and RB buttons to lean around corners, instead of going in guns blazing with a shotgun to the face approach. In fact that Nerf gun, that I mentioned earlier, can be used to lure enemies to certain positions. It is not the best mechanic, you do have an enemy spotting bar which lights up when you are noticed, but as soon as it flashes read, you have been found and pretty much every enemy nearby will know where you are, unless you run off to a few rooms away and resume hiding, but the game does give you a few cool Typhon skills to help you out.
You can Mimic objects yourself, and teleport, leaving a physical projection of yourself in place to lure enemies to (in fact if they kill it, then they will assume that you are dead and go back to their normal routine; a feature borrowed from the other Arkane Studio game: Dishonored 2).
Of course you have a load of Typhon abilities for attacking. You can create EMPs (affecting nearby terminals for a time, which is a really cool feature), and power blasts to attack enemies. You can also instantly kill humans by using some psychic power I only used once to test it out.
The game gives you a lot of variety in how you want to play. You can run through the entire game only acquiring human powers, or just using the Typhon abilities (although you have to just run through the game bare bones until you unlock part of the game where you can spend Neuomods on Typhon powers, but by then you would have had about eighty of them to spend), or you can just run through the game with no skills what-so-ever, if you wanted to give yourself an additional challenge, as the weapons themselves give you a lot of variations to help adapt to your play style and counter for the lack of skills. For example, you receive EMP grenades so you can throw them down and stun hostile operators for a time, or you can use your Glue gun to hold them in place.
Prey does really just let you get on with it, as you can choose to kill everyone if you wanted, or explore everything and discover hidden Neuromods or crafting plans.

Before I move on to crafting and weapons, one great moment in the game for me was when I walked past a friendly turret and realised that they scan for Typhon material, programmed to only attack the aliens, meaning that if I started to use Neuromods for Typhon skills, then I would then be targeted by these machines which I had previous used to my benefit by luring enemies towards them and letting them deal with them. If I started putting skill points into alien powers, then these would then become my enemies as well. It was the main reason that I did not acquire any Typhon abilities until well over halfway into the game (maybe even two thirds). I honestly didn’t even want to get a single one, but then I realised I was missing a huge chuck on what Prey had to offer, and so it is best to save Human only runs, or no skills runs, for another play through.

The way the crafting works is you find all manner of random items and food or drink (which can be used to heal, but your basic medi-kit works much better), and you head over to a device called a fabricator. You chuck in all your random toot acquired since the last time you visited a fabricator (Pro-Tip! Upgrade your inventory space as soon as possible!) in, and press the button. This machine condenses the objects down into various cubes of resources (such as biological or metal, all of which can be checked in your inventory screen hovering over the item itself or when it is in fabricator as a total), and it is from these cubes that you can stick them into a different machine and craft weapons, tools, medi-kits, items, or ammo, depending if you have discovered the crafting plans for that particular item. The cubes themselves go into the same location for that specific type of cube, so it saves so much space in your inventory screen.
You do not get the shotgun ammo crafting plans until far later in the game and the shotgun was my holy-cross throughout Prey and when I was running low on ammo, I honestly felt in pain, especially as there are no machine or submachine guns in the game, so you are forced to use powerful weapons over multiple hits in Prey.

This resource gathering is a really cool mechanic that encourages you to explore as much of Talos-1 as possible. I think the reason why the game took me as long as it did (clocking thirty hours) was because I really did explore every bin, cupboard and corpse I came across. I felt as if I wanted to check them out and I loved it when I found myself inside a new area with a lot of objects for me to check, my eyes would light up. Sometimes I ran out of ammo and so I was desperate to search for whatever I could, often having to resort to breaking down Medi-Kits and items I really didn’t want to get rid of, just for their resources to craft more ammo. It was then that Prey had really took with me and I was truly absorbed into the game and planning what I was going to do next, as I played it.

While we are on the subject, the Glue gun is the game’s most unique weapon. It fires a blob of grey glue that instantly hardens. It can be used to stop enemies in their tracks (Pro Tip! Glue Gun – Shotgun… well not really a pro tip as it instantly destroys the glue and the enemy is freed, but it is an effective method of taking down Phantoms), or you can use it to create bridges or stepping stones to get to a location, most of the time a location which is higher. It works brilliantly and, when you are exploring, you are constantly thinking of how you could use it to reach somewhere up high.

Going back to the side missions and the actual exploration of the game, traversing Talos-1 was not the greatest. The station is broken down into various large locations, as well as an outside area where you can float about (the no gravity sections of the game are done really well and the controls are good. Sometimes it can be a bit disorientating, but I can imagine that it is just like that in real life in zero-G). The only issue is that between each section you are forced to sit through one of the longest loading screens I have ever witnessed in an Xbox One title. I am not sure what it is like on PC or PS4, but I can imagine that it is not far off. I was able to get up and go to the toilet, grab myself another drink and come back in, before it was even three quarters of the way done. It literally takes forever to go from one location to another.
I would often make the effort to go through the doorway, leading to a new area, before turning it off for the night so that I would not have to endeavour multiple loading screens (as you have to sit through one to get into the game) for my next play sessions.
Most of the time when doing side missions, these are now in previous locations you have to go back to and check in order to complete, and you will ALWAYS have to go through multiple areas to reach the objective, meaning that you would have to sit through two or three (sometimes more) loading screens before you get to actually playing the part of the game you wanted to do. This is why I was constantly planning ahead and thinking about what I needed to do in order to maximise the time I spent in an area before moving back, or on to the next, otherwise I would just be sitting there waiting for the game to load. Once I spent about 15 minutes in total travelling from one area to the place where my side mission objective marker was telling me to go.

I could probably spend another five pages going into the game play, but I feel that I have covered enough of that. Hopefully from this you have a good understanding of how Prey plays.
The story is non-existent really. You do discover audio-logs that tell you parts to help either bulk up the main storyline, give you an insight into the last moments of a character before they became the corpse you picked the Dictaphone off of, or give you a code for a door. Half of the time someone else is talking to you, either when there are nearby humans (which is not very often) or when someone is calling you (which happens all the bloody time), or you are trying to listen to it when a Typhon attacks and your shotgun drowns out any chance of hearing what is being said.
I have never really gotten along with this type of storytelling. Alien: Isolation and Bioshock, to name a few, have done this and mostly these games feel as if the story can sometimes feel as if it is not there, especially in the middle. Although they are both bad examples as I personally love those games, but if you have played them then you can see what I mean.

In Prey you are given your main objective quite early on in the game, and it does not change from that until the final choice at the end of the game. Over the course of it you are learning from calls from your Brother (who is some big shot scientist on-board) more about the story, but your objective never changes and so neither does your motivation. Being a silent protagonist doesn’t help and so Morgan never really engages in conversations and often leaves you only half listening to what was going on, as you know it will not really change what you are currently doing.
This was probably the only main downside to this game.

At the end of the game you do feel as if your choices slightly matter. The ending itself is terrible. In fact it was so bad that I really didn’t want to go back and continue searching for the lost employees that I was missing from the directory, or finish off the few side missions I had left (as there is no playing after the credits and the one part in the game that stops you from doing side missions; the point of no return, is not told to you and so suddenly you are just thrown into the last small section of the game without warning).
The ending is saved a little by the epilogue scene after the credits, but since the game has so many different eventualities and outcomes based on how you play the game, and big choice you make at the end of the game, and another in the epilogue scene, I am really struggling to see how they can make a sequel that is not just a completely different story set using the Typhon alien species. It is a shame as I would have liked to continue the story in future games, but we know that if Bethesda will make a sequel, it will only use this game as the background story to lay the ground works for a completely new tale. Which is not the worst idea I suppose, it is just a bit of a shame as some times it can make you feel as if it was all for nothing.

Overall, despite a weak story that never really gets going after the first section until the very very end, I loved Prey. I am feeling a little deflated by the ending and I do wish it hadn’t left me with this horrible after-taste in my mouth, but the actual gameplay of Prey was solid. The mechanics worked well, the setting was good, the music was awesome, and the exploring really worked to its advantage, if the loadings scenes weren’t so damn long!
At the moment Prey is my 2017 game of the year, but we still have that huge haul that spawns later in the year to come, so time will tell. Unfortunately I do not think it will hold this title due to the negative factors mentioned above, but if you wanted a good game to run through and enjoy the actual part of playing the game (the mechanics and abilities or what not), then you can do a lot worse than Prey.
I personally had a lot of fun with this game and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is a big fan of Systemshock, Bioshock, First Person Shooters, or Sci-Fi fans in general.
I, for one, would love to venture once more to Talos-1 (or another Typhon overrun location) in a few years in a sequel.

End Transmission.