Prey Review

I’d rather be the predator

(This review contains minor spoilers!)

          Right out of the gates people were concerned about Prey. A reboot of a 2006 game, this looked nothing like the promised Prey 2 announced a few years prior to release. As I never played the original I can’t tell you how it compares to the newer version, but what I can say is that you’re probably better off saving your money.

          Prey is a game that has several really good ideas up its sleeve, but crushes all of them under lackluster gameplay and an unwillingness to let you play the game how you want, despite player freedom being one of their major selling points.

          You play as Morgan Yu, a scientist of your gender choice aboard the spacecraft Talos I. After completing an actually pretty funny opening sequence, things immediately go horribly wrong as the ship is taken control by the Typhon, an army of sinister black goo monsters with varying abilities. It’s your job to destroy them once and for all, taking back the Talos or destroying it in the process.

          Easily the best part of the game for me was the direction taken with the visual design. Unlike most similar games, Prey is inspired by 1950’s era sci-fi comic books and novels, giving everything a very fun and unique flavour. If you’ve played stuff like Bioshock, it isn’t dissimilar to that. The game also runs extremely smoothly on PS4, with no framedrops as far as I could see.

          But as soon as you start playing the game, problems begin to arise, the first of them being the frequent loading screens. Each time you boot up Prey you are greeted with not one, not two, but three lengthy loading screens, with many more following you around each time you need to enter a new area on the Talos. They’re annoyingly frequent and long, messing up immersion many times.

          The Talos I is both fun to explore and frustrating to navigate. I enjoyed being taken to new areas of the ship, especially when I was allowed to float around in zero gravity around outside. Unfortunately, backtracking to old locations is a painstaking experience. The map you’re given does little to help you figure out where you’re trying to get to, especially if you’re backtracking to find a specific place you’ve been before. You can’t place markers or anything like that. At one point in the game I got radiation poisoning, making poor Morgan stumble around constantly. I was forced to put up with it for way longer than I should have, purely because I couldn’t find a medical station anywhere and one never appeared on the map.

          Speaking of radiation poisoning, our unlucky hero/heroine can encounter a number of irritating status changes on their journey, from getting temporarily drunk after drinking too many alcoholic healing items to being so afraid of your alien adversaries that you lose the ability to aim straight. I’ve said it before but since this seems to be becoming a trend in gaming I suppose it’s worth saying again: realism does not make games fun. It slows down your progress and requires you to go out of your way to refill a meter just so you can play the game normally again. It’s more of a hindrance than a fun mechanic, and here it’s no different. I definitely didn’t enjoy spending a good chunk of my time with Prey stumbling around like I was on ice skates just because I couldn’t find a way to get rid of it.

          And now to get to the most miserable part of the entire experience for me and the ultimate reason why I literally can’t go any further into the game: the combat.

          The Typhon aren’t exactly the most inspired enemy designs. Take the Xenomorphs from Alien mixed with Venom of Spider-Man, but remove what make those two cool. You’re left with black goopy monsters that constantly get in your way while making laughable attempts at jumpscares. Prey does try an interesting tactic with the most common type of Typhon, known as Mimics, which can transform into random objects like mugs or computer consoles in an attempt to surprise you. But honestly in all my time playing I rarely saw a Mimic actually doing the ability it was named for. More often than not I walked into a room, had one run in front of me and scream before I smashed it to death with my wrench.

          You have many different tools which you can use to subdue your foes, some more entertaining than others. The most entertaining one I found was the GLOO Gun, a cannon that launches large balls of glue that you can use to freeze an enemy in place, build platforms, and all sorts of other fun stuff. It’s a very creative weapon and it got me very excited to see what other fun stuff this game had come up with.

          Imagine my disappointment when the next weapon I found was a silenced pistol. Oh well.

          You’re also equipped with a wrench for melee attacks, which you’ll honestly be using way more than your ranged weapon for one reason in particular: Prey hates giving you ammo. Literally, the developers must be allergic to it or something.

          It honestly doesn’t matter, because even the early game foes are bullet sponges that would make Friday the 13th’s Jason feel jealous. You can unload an entire pistol clip into one of the larger ones and barely make a dent in its health bar. This quickly leads to you running out of ammo in both your GLOO Gun and your standard weapons, leaving you with only two choices: either trying to melee the buggers or turning Morgan into Usain Bolt and trying to run past them to the next objective before they catch you.

          What’s really annoying about this is that despite the Typhon’s offensive and defensive capabilities not being unlike that of a monster in a survival horror game, they’re placed in the map like action game cannon fodder enemies. You’ll often be walking from point A to point B when you’re suddenly ambushed by up to six Typhon at one, depleting your resources and often dying several times as you try to figure out a way around them.

          Seriously, you die in this game way too much. At one point I got so sick of seeing the death screen that I actually changed the difficulty setting from Normal to Easy to try and get further in the game. I didn’t even notice a difference to be honest, and I dread to think what the higher levels are like.

          And this is where things started to get legitimately messy for me. Like most other modern games, Prey employs a skill tree system you can use to improve Morgan’s various abilities. The developers have even proclaimed many times that this is a game you can “play your way”. With this in mind, early on I decided to go for a more stealth oriented build (still thinking the enemies would operate like normal horror game enemies) with some points in stuff like hacking and repairs to try and get around the map easier. Imagine my surprise when my stealth turned out to be absolutely worthless because you more often than not encounter Typhon in small rooms or hallways with nowhere to hide and are spotted in seconds.

          You can get more ammo, but to do so you have to pick up various materials like wire and computer chips littered around all over the place. Trust me when I say that you’ll need to thoroughly search each room for loot, because crafting ammo doesn’t come cheap. Crafting stations are also few and far between, meaning that it’s not really something to rely on.

          Seriously, the game keeps sending flags that you shouldn’t be engaging the Typhon in combat. Why do they keep placing them in hallways where I have no option but to fight my way through?

          Anyways, this being my first time playing and not following a guide of any means, I didn’t have much in the way of ammo because I didn’t collect all the knickknacks the game didn’t tell me I needed to craft them. I eventually got to a point where I was trapped in a room with a boss I had no way of defeating, at which point I called it quits on the whole operation.

          I have no interest in ever going back and trying Prey again with a different character build. If I had to sum up my entire experience with the game in one word, it’d be “frustrating”. Everything about this game seems designed to make you feel as angry as possible, from the meatshield enemies that are necessary to fight just so you can progress to the resources so limited that Silent Hill would call them out on it to the fact that the game’s much touted “play your way” system falls completely flat once you realize that you literally can build your character wrong and will have to restart the entire adventure just so you can keep progressing.

          Literally the only things this game has going for it is the cool 1950’s-esque visual design and the creative GLOO Gun. That’s it. If for whatever reason you still really want to check Prey out, I’d say rent it first or wait for it to go on supersale. You won’t be missing much.

FINAL SCORE

3/10

Bad