PREY Game Review - A Constant State of Anxiety

Arkane Studios’ 2017 sci-fi shooter, Prey was one of those games I almost missed entirely. I was never a fan of Arkane’s previous claim to fame, Dishonored, and it was really only out of sheer boredom I decided to pick up Prey one lazy afternoon and see what all the fuss was about.

In a nutshell, Prey is awesome. I love it. I really have only one or two complaints, which in the interest of a balanced review I will mention, but honestly, the game is practically flawless.

Prey is a survival horror game in a science fiction setting, with elements of a first-person shooter. Each area of the derelict space station where it takes place is essentially a game level, and each enemy type has certain strengths and weaknesses. If you take your time, learn the levels, learn the enemies, and apply a little strategy to your gameplay, Prey will really reward you with an exciting, and at times excruciatingly tense experience. It is loads of fun.

Lurking in the shadows...

One thing Prey does really well – it keeps you in an almost constant state of anxiety. The damaged space station creaks and bangs. Every shadow may conceal an enemy. You almost never know what to expect around any given corner or through any doorway. Speaking of doorways – some of the electric doors are malfunctioning, so they open and close randomly. You find yourself constantly looking over your shoulder. And one of the enemy alien types – the Mimic – can disguise itself as literally anything. You will find yourself blowing away coffee mugs and frantically whacking chairs with a wrench, because they just might be a mimic lying in wait. And the enemies respawn in a really cool way – you can never wander around confident that you have cleared an area. Prey doesn’t work that way. Just because you have cleared one area of the map doesn’t mean there won’t be mimics or more dangerous enemies lurking there the next time you have to travel through that area. And Prey makes damn sure you have to do this – often you will find objectives force you to go back through an area you’ve previously ‘cleared’. I don’t think any other game has had me on the edge of my seat the way this one did, from start to finish. 

Story

You are Morgan Yu (you can be either M or F), stranded on a derelict space station called Talos I, suffering selective amnesia and with nothing but a wrench to defend yourself against the mysterious Typhon, a race of intelligent, hostile aliens with all kinds of gnarly abilities like shapeshifting and mind-control.

The game takes place in an alternate reality where President John F Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963 and America never went to war in Vietnam, so the space race ramped up instead, leading to rapid space exploration that then led to mankind encountering the Typhon – an entire ecosystem of bizarre, morphing aliens who we only discovered were incredibly hostile after it was too late.

Researchers from the TranStar Corporation discovered they could harness the aliens’ special abilities in devices called Neuromods, and quickly became mega successful hawking the neuromods to rich people on Earth. 

Of course, things went catastrophically wrong one idle Tuesday, and that brings us to Prey.

Gameplay

I think Prey is a little misunderstood. The criticism levelled at it is stuff I’ve heard before about another wildly misunderstood game, Ubisoft Montreal’s 2008 shooter Far Cry 2, and that is the combat is too hard, the enemies respawn ridiculously fast, stealth is broken, etc. 

Much like Far Cry 2 did, Prey rewards you for playing the game well, and punishes you severely for, well, playing like a dick. And at first, that is exactly what I did. Even though I did not preorder the game I received the preorder bonus with it – a levelled up shotgun. So of course, I immediately started blasting enemies to kingdom come with it, because hey, that’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I very quickly ran out of shells and was reduced to bashing alien heads in with a wrench. After having my ass handed to me mercilessly over and over again I quit and started a new game and decided to really learn the game and play it properly. And man, what a difference that made.

Danger lurks behind every door

Prey rewards patience, and research. Research? I hear you say. You can’t be serious! 

But let me explain, and dispel some of that negative criticism I have seen.

Prey is really not a first-person shooter, it can just seem like one. Being a survival game, resources are scarce, so you have to conserve ammo and use it wisely, and use your surroundings, whatever you have available. The game drip-feeds information to you about the enemies you encounter, so you can slowly start to discover their weaknesses and use those against them. 

Know your enemy...

The game is semi-open world. It takes place on a space station and each area of the station is in fact a ‘level’. If you barge into an area and start blasting away with the shotgun, you will be very quickly overwhelmed and the game’s enemies are some of the least forgiving I have ever encountered in any game. They will absolutely destroy you if you let them. If, on the other hand, you enter a new level quietly, use your ‘scope’ to spot enemies before they spot you, learn their movements, know their weaknesses, and then sneak in and unleash holy hell upon them, you will quickly dominate them, clear the area, loot the crap out of it, and walk out feeling like a total badass. 

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to use a melee combat playstyle and go gung-ho on the enemies, you can indeed do that. It’s just not nearly as fun. Seriously, there is nothing more satisfying in Prey than laying a trap, luring an enemy into it, and then springing out from behind a corner and finishing them off with a shotgun blast to the face.

That brings me to this, stealth is far from broken in Prey. It just doesn’t work the same as other games. As I mentioned, Arkane previously developed the Dishonored series. Stealth in Prey works a little like the stealth mechanic in Dishonored. That is, you really need to be stealthy, not just toggle the crouch button. If there are shadows, you need to use them. If there are obstacles to hide behind, get behind them. Move slowly. And I mean s-l-o-w-l-y.

The skill tree in Prey is handled by way of the aforementioned neuromods, funky little devices that implant skills directly into the brain via the eyeball (yeah…ouch), but the skills are basically the usual: you can buff your physical strength, your mental acuity, your weapons, etc. Eventually you can access the Typhon neuromods that let you explore cooler abilities like being able to shapeshift into random objects, fire EMP pulses at electromagnetic enemies, or zap-transport yourself short distances to get out of tight spots. It’s all very cool and I don’t want to spoil it – the abilities are best explored and developed for whatever playstyle you want. 

The skill tree

Complaints department, take a number

So, there are a couple of minor things that detracted from my Prey experience, but really they are just that – minor. One is the NPC dialogue. Occasionally, the NPCs will chatter incessantly in your ear right in the middle of combat. There’s no way to skip any of it either, which made my second playthrough a bit laborious since I had heard all the conversations before. And the game doesn’t seem to realise one character hasn’t finished talking before another starts in, at one point in the game I had two NPCs talking over one another, and in an effort to get away from them so I could hear myself think, I accidentally wandered too close to another NPC who started yammering away at me to activate another quest, so I had three people yabbering at me, yet I couldn’t hear any of them properly. The game saves all the conversations in a menu so you can access them later, so I don’t understand why there was no option to skip the dialogue.

Some of the NPCs will go to great lengths to talk to you

The only other things are even more minor. Prey does a great job, for the most part, of giving you numerous ways to solve any problem – locked door? There’s usually an Aliens-style ventilation duct to crawl through. Too many strong enemies in one room? You can usually find an alternate route and sneak past them. But there are several times the game forces you to do this silly mini-game where you have to hack terminals. You have to bounce a little ball through an obstacle course and land it in a hole at the end. It was like a bizarre combination of mini-golf and that old board game, Operation (you get zapped if the ball hits the red walls). I found it distracting and really frustrating. 

Lastly, the inventory management is clunky. I only mention it because at no point in the game does the inventory become a non-issue, you constantly have to prioritise and juggle, especially on the harder difficulties.

The inventory management is a bit clunky

But, while these things are a little irritating, none of them are game-breaking. 

Conclusion 

Prey is a really apt title. The game has a great way of, even after 30 hours when you have numerous skills and buffed weapons, making you feel like you are not the hunter, but the hunted. Creeping around the creaky space station, heart pounding, down to my last ammo clip, happening across a vitally needed medkit only to have the damn thing turn out to be a mimic and lurch up off the table and attack me, face-hugger style, just never got old for me. 

Actual gameplay, not a cutscene. Prey is a beautiful game.

The game has a really punishing learning curve, especially if you’re not used to this kind of game (I was not), but the payoff is an intriguing story, great combat, beautiful art design, a cool retro sci-fi soundtrack, and a campaign that is just the right length, short enough to be instantly replayable, long enough that if one playthrough is all you want, you’ll more than have got your money’s worth by the time the credits roll.

Prey is highly recommended.