Thursday 19 Oct 2006

“You’ve learnt how to fight white man’s wars, and how to use white man’s weapons Tommy, now it’s time you took a lesson from your ancestors.”

Every decent game needs a story and as bizarre as this one is, it does set up the playing field for some interesting scenarios. Prey is an FPS game, you play as Tommy, a man of American Red Indian heritage, but you do not believe in all that nonsense and think that the “Cherokee” is a fictional story made up to amuse young children. Tired of having lived all your life in the reserve, you can’t help but wonder how much better your life could be if you could only get out into the big wide world. Running the bar with your grandfather and girlfriend Jen is a laborious bore and you long for more. Well you can’t say you didn’t get what you asked for when aliens invade earth and start to harvest humans to feed upon now, can you? Yes ok, it is kinda cheesy. It does feel at times that you’ve stepped into a War of the Worlds meets Doom game, but hey whatever gets me to the marauding hoards of aliens quicker, I like.

I’m not going to tell you too much about the rest of the story though as I don’t want to be the one to spoil it for anyone, and regardless of what I’ve just said, the story does have that “X” factor that makes you want to play just one more level, just one more level.

I really like the inclusion of the Red Indian heritage stuff, for instance throughout the game you will find yourself going into spirit mode… “Tommy, let your spirit go to where your body cannot.” This is a great mechanic for setting up puzzles in the game, a feature that is so often disregarded in today’s conventional FPS games. These puzzles usually revolve around walking onto a platform, then going into spirit mode (leaving your body on the platform). You would then have to go find the switch to activate the platform with your spirit, thus moving your body to the next area.

Another clever dynamic that they have put into the game is Portals and almost constant gravity changes. The portals look really fantastic, they will either take the form of rifts (holes in an open space) or they will be in doorways. When you walk past them you can see through into where it leads, and even see enemy creatures there but they can shoot you through the portal! So once you build up the courage to pass through one of these strange things, you will enter into the other side… duh. The sound and environment changes completely, and most times the gravity too. This is going to be hard to explain, but imagine stepping through a doorway and then all of a sudden you fall to the left because that is now the floor. They really love this effect as they use it wherever possible throughout the game. There are also walkways, which are, as far as I can tell, electromagnetic so that when you walk onto them you stick to the surface. These pathways then curve up walls and / or go upside down, and thus change the centre of gravity for you so that you will be shooting at creatures that look like they are walking on the ceiling but in fact they are on the ground and you are on the ceiling. I don’t recommend this for people who tend to suffer from motion sickness as it can get really, really disorientating sometimes.