So this weekend I did a little manipulating of the pocket book and got a hold of Prey on PC. AS a result as was able to put some time in with the game so that I can write up a review for your reading enjoyment...or hate....yeah you're probably gonna hate me for this one.
Prey is shit. I know it is only my personal option and "B-Cell" is going to hate me for it, but holy balls, this game is awful. Which is weird because looking at the opening and the premise of the game it seemed like it should be right up my alley. But instead it's such a mess of a game that I don't even really know where to begin. I can't even recall a game that turned me off so quickly.
So before I get into this I need to come out and say, I hated my experience with this title so much I played for exactly two hours, and put it up on Steam's Refund request system. Which means everything I am about to say is the first two hours of the game, and that means there is a possibility that after that two hour mark the game could suddenly become all blowjobs and orgasms. I highly doubt it though.
Prey starts off with you picking a boy or a girl, both of which are named Morgan Yu which is nice since Morgan fits as a name for either gender, it also means that the developers avoid the backlash of not letting you play a girl while at the same time not having to record two sets of dialog just because the character's name changed. Morgan her/himself has no personality so it really doesn't matter (though there are autologs by your character which state the same thing just in a girl voice or a man's voice).
Once you pick your genitals, you wake up in your apartment and prepare for your first morning of tests at your new job of being the test subject for an evil corporation. You don't know they are evil at first, but that prediction is practically written on the walls. So you show up for your experiments and fail all of them miserably, which prompts a bunch of Symbiotes from Spider-Man to escape and murder everyone in the facility. You just get knocked out, because you are the main character so obviously you aren't going to die when you are weak and helpless, and you wake back up in your apartment like nothing every happened.
Except surprise, your apartment is really just a fake stage set up by the evil corporation so they can watch your every move. Your character having voluntarily applied to be the subject of a large test where they try to give you alien supper powers or some such gob. Anyway an anonymous voice on the phone leads you to escape into the facility where the game proper begins.
Now this set up was actually pretty good. But as I think about it now, it is all very Half-Life isn't it. Right up to the first enemies you see are black blobby crab monsters, and I realize that Prey IS Half-Life! Or at least that's what it wants to be. Yet as you get into the gameplay proper you start to realize the problems right out of the gate.
First lets talk about the enemies. Like Half-Life, Prey is a first person game, but I wouldn't call it a first person shooter. The game tells you up front that there are many ways to approach things. By which they mean there are two ways to deal with things. Stealth or Guns ablazing, or in the first ninety minutes, Wrench Flailing. Not that this is bad, but here is the problem. The enemies are called "mimics" and guess what they do? That's right they take the forms of everyday objects or more specifically they disguise themselves as object you want to loot. How exactly does the game expect you to stealth up to enemies you can't see. Isn't that the point of stealth? You can see them but they can't see you until your wrench as already caved in half their skull?
Instead what ends up happening is you look around, don't see any enemies, so you go over to loot all the shiny things all over the room until one of them explodes into a crab monster and proceeds to tear you apart until you can finally beat them down with your wrench. This leads me into another problem. The gave is fucking dark, shadows cover most of the rooms and hallways due to things being royally fucked and normally this is a good thing. Darkness leads to atmosphere and tension as the player tries to work their way through a hard to navigate and unfamiliar area where monsters roam. You know what is hard to see in the dark? Pitch black tiny crawling fuck monsters! Who thought this was a good idea? Seriously? Give the player a melee weapon, then make the first enemies small, extremely fast, extremely hard to see monsters that that rip the player apart very quickly and make them also take three to four good hits from the only weapon we've given the player up to this point?
Go fuck yourself game. That's not good design, it made me motion sick trying to track the speedy little fuck wits.
If the little mimic bastards weren't bad enough, guess what the second enemy in the game is. A big fuck off humamoid blob monster that shoots lightning at you. Again, I only have a melee weapon at this point and it's not even a good one. So the second enemy you put me again, shoot motherfucking lightning? Fuck you Prey, that's not good design. Don't give the player options, and then turn around an actively punish the player for picking the option you don't like.
Prey ends up feeling like Dishonored or a bad Dues Ex game. Stealth away and get through the levels without trying to be seen. Oh wait you'll still have to fight the speedy mimic bastards who will usually end up bring captain lightning fingers down upon you. Again, how exactly am I suppose to stealth past enemies that look like chairs or fire hydrants until I get close enough to have my face eaten?
That's bad enough without stating that the enemies being nothing more than black blurs in different shapes is also just lazy and poor monster design. They aren't scary, they have no features. They are blanks, featureless. The only excitement comes from not really being able to fight them, or depending on the lighting, even fucking SEE them.
So in short. Combat sucks. The enemies suck. And looking through the skill trees, it doesn't look at be any better at a later time.
So level design then. Prey was touted as a non-linear explore-a-fest filled with secrets and all kinds of different routes to reach your objective. This is also a lie. The areas are little more than hallways and big rooms filled with clutter. What the game actually does is send you back and forth through these areas over and over again to make them seem expansive and non-linear. This was the straw that broke my back on this game.
You see, terrible combat I can deal with, especially since there are ways to ignore most of it. It is perfectly viable to sneak around the levels, only dealing with the enemies that pretend to be the furniture you are hiding against. So the majority of the combat can be avoided. However you still have to deal with the level design and mission structure.
I came across a security room, which i could only enter after ducking under debris that blocked the upper part of the door. That security room was half-way to my objective of a specific scientist's office. In this room I found a computer which unlocked a locker with a gun (fucking finally) in it. So I marked the room as a secret room and continued on with my shiny new pistol. Upon reaching the scientist's office the game said, "Sorry Mr. Fuckwit isn't here. So to the security station and find out where he is." You mean that security station I was already at, half-way here? Yep. So backtrack all the way there, use the console to find out where in the level the scientist actually was. Turns out he is on the other side of the level form his office, because of course he is.
So you run all the way across the level you've already been through, to find the scientist dead, floating in a room that has been breached and is floating in dead space (references!). The voice on your phone says you can't possibly go into the room to get the dead man's keycard and you must find upgrades for your suit to go into space and control yourself with trusters. Which means, you guessed it, go back to the other side of the fucking level to find the upgrade and come all the way back, get the keycard and then so all the way back AGAIN, to finally use the keycard to open the guys office.
You know what? Fuck that. There is padding and then there is this bullshit. This is nothing but padding, creating the whole errand boy tasks that send you through the same boring level no less than four times so they can make a single level last two hours.
And before you make the argument, I'm very well aware that it is entirely possible to stumble across items you'd need to skip a step or two in this back and forth, but that would mean you have to explore everything and frankly I instantly lost my desire to explore when the game told me that every shiny pick up I spot could actually be a horrible monster instead. And since I hated the combat, I wanted to avoid that as much as possible.
So in the end, Fuck Prey, fuck it hard. It's a game that contradicts itself at every moment. It offers you choices but there is a big fat * on every one of them. You can stealth around, but enemies can pop out at you from anywhere anyway so it defeats the purpose. You can fight, but the enemies out class you and will quickly chew your health and suit meter away like it's free slurpy day at 7-11.
And you know the kicker. I was constantly getting my ass kicked on "easy" mode. I wanted to see and play a cool thriller game, enjoy the story, relax a little. But the game did nothing but waste my time, so fuck it.
Prey is not an action packed FPS. It is not even an FPS game. It's Dishonored in space. Except without anything that made Dishonored good.
Prey is shit. I know it is only my personal option and "B-Cell" is going to hate me for it, but holy balls, this game is awful. Which is weird because looking at the opening and the premise of the game it seemed like it should be right up my alley. But instead it's such a mess of a game that I don't even really know where to begin. I can't even recall a game that turned me off so quickly.
So before I get into this I need to come out and say, I hated my experience with this title so much I played for exactly two hours, and put it up on Steam's Refund request system. Which means everything I am about to say is the first two hours of the game, and that means there is a possibility that after that two hour mark the game could suddenly become all blowjobs and orgasms. I highly doubt it though.
Prey starts off with you picking a boy or a girl, both of which are named Morgan Yu which is nice since Morgan fits as a name for either gender, it also means that the developers avoid the backlash of not letting you play a girl while at the same time not having to record two sets of dialog just because the character's name changed. Morgan her/himself has no personality so it really doesn't matter (though there are autologs by your character which state the same thing just in a girl voice or a man's voice).
Once you pick your genitals, you wake up in your apartment and prepare for your first morning of tests at your new job of being the test subject for an evil corporation. You don't know they are evil at first, but that prediction is practically written on the walls. So you show up for your experiments and fail all of them miserably, which prompts a bunch of Symbiotes from Spider-Man to escape and murder everyone in the facility. You just get knocked out, because you are the main character so obviously you aren't going to die when you are weak and helpless, and you wake back up in your apartment like nothing every happened.
Except surprise, your apartment is really just a fake stage set up by the evil corporation so they can watch your every move. Your character having voluntarily applied to be the subject of a large test where they try to give you alien supper powers or some such gob. Anyway an anonymous voice on the phone leads you to escape into the facility where the game proper begins.
Now this set up was actually pretty good. But as I think about it now, it is all very Half-Life isn't it. Right up to the first enemies you see are black blobby crab monsters, and I realize that Prey IS Half-Life! Or at least that's what it wants to be. Yet as you get into the gameplay proper you start to realize the problems right out of the gate.
First lets talk about the enemies. Like Half-Life, Prey is a first person game, but I wouldn't call it a first person shooter. The game tells you up front that there are many ways to approach things. By which they mean there are two ways to deal with things. Stealth or Guns ablazing, or in the first ninety minutes, Wrench Flailing. Not that this is bad, but here is the problem. The enemies are called "mimics" and guess what they do? That's right they take the forms of everyday objects or more specifically they disguise themselves as object you want to loot. How exactly does the game expect you to stealth up to enemies you can't see. Isn't that the point of stealth? You can see them but they can't see you until your wrench as already caved in half their skull?
Instead what ends up happening is you look around, don't see any enemies, so you go over to loot all the shiny things all over the room until one of them explodes into a crab monster and proceeds to tear you apart until you can finally beat them down with your wrench. This leads me into another problem. The gave is fucking dark, shadows cover most of the rooms and hallways due to things being royally fucked and normally this is a good thing. Darkness leads to atmosphere and tension as the player tries to work their way through a hard to navigate and unfamiliar area where monsters roam. You know what is hard to see in the dark? Pitch black tiny crawling fuck monsters! Who thought this was a good idea? Seriously? Give the player a melee weapon, then make the first enemies small, extremely fast, extremely hard to see monsters that that rip the player apart very quickly and make them also take three to four good hits from the only weapon we've given the player up to this point?
Go fuck yourself game. That's not good design, it made me motion sick trying to track the speedy little fuck wits.
If the little mimic bastards weren't bad enough, guess what the second enemy in the game is. A big fuck off humamoid blob monster that shoots lightning at you. Again, I only have a melee weapon at this point and it's not even a good one. So the second enemy you put me again, shoot motherfucking lightning? Fuck you Prey, that's not good design. Don't give the player options, and then turn around an actively punish the player for picking the option you don't like.
Prey ends up feeling like Dishonored or a bad Dues Ex game. Stealth away and get through the levels without trying to be seen. Oh wait you'll still have to fight the speedy mimic bastards who will usually end up bring captain lightning fingers down upon you. Again, how exactly am I suppose to stealth past enemies that look like chairs or fire hydrants until I get close enough to have my face eaten?
That's bad enough without stating that the enemies being nothing more than black blurs in different shapes is also just lazy and poor monster design. They aren't scary, they have no features. They are blanks, featureless. The only excitement comes from not really being able to fight them, or depending on the lighting, even fucking SEE them.
So in short. Combat sucks. The enemies suck. And looking through the skill trees, it doesn't look at be any better at a later time.
So level design then. Prey was touted as a non-linear explore-a-fest filled with secrets and all kinds of different routes to reach your objective. This is also a lie. The areas are little more than hallways and big rooms filled with clutter. What the game actually does is send you back and forth through these areas over and over again to make them seem expansive and non-linear. This was the straw that broke my back on this game.
You see, terrible combat I can deal with, especially since there are ways to ignore most of it. It is perfectly viable to sneak around the levels, only dealing with the enemies that pretend to be the furniture you are hiding against. So the majority of the combat can be avoided. However you still have to deal with the level design and mission structure.
I came across a security room, which i could only enter after ducking under debris that blocked the upper part of the door. That security room was half-way to my objective of a specific scientist's office. In this room I found a computer which unlocked a locker with a gun (fucking finally) in it. So I marked the room as a secret room and continued on with my shiny new pistol. Upon reaching the scientist's office the game said, "Sorry Mr. Fuckwit isn't here. So to the security station and find out where he is." You mean that security station I was already at, half-way here? Yep. So backtrack all the way there, use the console to find out where in the level the scientist actually was. Turns out he is on the other side of the level form his office, because of course he is.
So you run all the way across the level you've already been through, to find the scientist dead, floating in a room that has been breached and is floating in dead space (references!). The voice on your phone says you can't possibly go into the room to get the dead man's keycard and you must find upgrades for your suit to go into space and control yourself with trusters. Which means, you guessed it, go back to the other side of the fucking level to find the upgrade and come all the way back, get the keycard and then so all the way back AGAIN, to finally use the keycard to open the guys office.
You know what? Fuck that. There is padding and then there is this bullshit. This is nothing but padding, creating the whole errand boy tasks that send you through the same boring level no less than four times so they can make a single level last two hours.
And before you make the argument, I'm very well aware that it is entirely possible to stumble across items you'd need to skip a step or two in this back and forth, but that would mean you have to explore everything and frankly I instantly lost my desire to explore when the game told me that every shiny pick up I spot could actually be a horrible monster instead. And since I hated the combat, I wanted to avoid that as much as possible.
So in the end, Fuck Prey, fuck it hard. It's a game that contradicts itself at every moment. It offers you choices but there is a big fat * on every one of them. You can stealth around, but enemies can pop out at you from anywhere anyway so it defeats the purpose. You can fight, but the enemies out class you and will quickly chew your health and suit meter away like it's free slurpy day at 7-11.
And you know the kicker. I was constantly getting my ass kicked on "easy" mode. I wanted to see and play a cool thriller game, enjoy the story, relax a little. But the game did nothing but waste my time, so fuck it.
Prey is not an action packed FPS. It is not even an FPS game. It's Dishonored in space. Except without anything that made Dishonored good.
