Graphics, sound, etc.

Since the game uses the Doom 3 engine, Prey already has a heads-up on most current first person shooters in the visual department The game looks great with some impressive character models, weapon effects and some weird alien levels and environments. Sometimes the looks of the levels can be somewhat repetitive (if you’ve seen one bio-organic room, you've seen them all) but Human Head does keep things interesting like showing locations that the aliens have beamed up from Earth, like the bar, a jumbo jet and a school bus. They even beam up the bar’s poker machines which somehow end up in places in the ship that you don’t expect them to. As with the demo, I experience little to no frame rate slowdown while playing Prey on my middle of the road PC system.

Sound is a very important part of Prey, from the weapon effects to screams and yells that will sometimes curl your blood, and even some decent voice acting from the principals (including eccentric radio personality Art Bell who can be heard somehow inside the ship). Prey’s soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soule is top-notch with appropriate movie style action beats, but the designers have also put in classic 1970’s and 1980’s rock tunes in the mix as well. As we mentioned in our demo preview, there is also interaction in the game, like playing poker and figuring out how to open alien doors.

The multiplayer portion of Prey is kind of like the single player game; on the surface it’s been done before with just deathmatch and team deathmatch available for up to eight players. However with the portals and gravity effects in full force in multiplayer you could fend off attacks by opponents on the walls and on the ceiling which makes the standard deathmatch round more interesting. We would have liked some more modes included however - for example, CTF with portals and gravity effects sounds pretty cool to us.

The game’s biggest drawback is its limited replayablity in single player. The game is a fairly short experience; we clocked in at just under 10 hours and that’s with using the demo’s save points to negate the beginning of the game. After you finish, the game opens up the Cherokee level of difficulty. Yes, it is more difficult, but it also suffers from the fact that if you die you just go to get your health replenished in the spirit world. As we mentioned before, the AI of Prey’s enemies is sometimes limited and we wish that the game had more kinds of multiplayer support. There are also some fairly long load times in between levels that tend to sap the pace of the game.

On a side note...

We decided to check out the Triton system to download the PC version of Prey. In the negatives column, the interface is clearly still bare bones and doesn’t have a lot of flash. Some people also apparently had some difficulty getting the CD key emailed to them but that seems to have been fixed now. On the plus side, however, the Triton system does exactly what it claimed it would do. Once you started pre-loading the game, it took less than 20 minutes to stream enough of it for us to start playing. If Triton can improve its interface and deal with some of its growing pains, it stands a chance to be a solid digital download service.