Prey

I have to admit, it’s a bit late in the day to be writing this one. I started the game way back in 2007 but then stopped for some reason. Anyway, I’ve recently been reviewing how to bring up my achievement completion percentage and only having 7 out of the 44 achievements for this one made it a prime candidate.

After about five minutes of playing I realised why I stopped. The game is horrendously boring and the main protagonist is about as likeable as a fungal nail infection. And just as interesting.

The game follows Tommy, a Native American who doesn’t like being a Native American and continues to whinge his guts up about the fact he hates his Native American heritage despite having conversations with his dead grandfather, gaining the reincarnated spirit of his dead pet bird and gaining the ability to walk in the spirit world. Yeah. Being a Native American sucks balls.

What happens is that Tommy is chilling in some dead end bar with literally no locals, debating whether or not he is going to tell the pixellated barmaid whether or he loves her. The next thing you know, he is being beamed aboard an alien spaceship full of aliens that are very deadly and experimenting on humans. Despite this completely out of the ordinary situation, Tommy continues to whine about his Native American heritage and just wants to get Jen (above referenced love interest) off of the spaceship. Never mind the fact that aliens have invaded the world. That happens most weekends.

Tommy continues to be oblivious to the incredible things that are happening to him and is solely focussed on rescuing Jen from the spaceship, despite the fact that Tommy has the ability to use every single alien weapon going without any training and he doesn’t question this either. The aliens are killing every human they can find and Tommy is focused on the one thing that is important to him. Basically, he is a selfish dick.

There’s not really much to say about the sound or visuals other than that they are unexceptional and do not add any value to the game.

Now, the gameplay. The gameplay is where Prey wins more points for monotonous mediocrity. You start the game with a wrench and gain about six other weapons. You walk though different areas of the spaceship which all look very similar. There are vehicle sections which seem to have been put in because it was during the time when every game needed a vehicle section. The most confusing bit though, is the fact that the game mechanics mean you can’t die after the first 20 minutes of the game, removing any challenge or need to play the game carefully. This also negates the need for a difficulty level but they still put a hard mode for some reason. In hard mode, there are no health pickups which means you will be ‘killed’ more but just have to play the resurrection mini-game more often than on normal.

The whole thing is very underwhelming and has encouraged me to never to listen to one of my friend’s gaming recommendations again.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

Of the 44 achievements, 23 of them can be gained from slogging through the game on Normal. You can then, and only then, get another from playing it through on the already mentioned and completely redundant Cherokee difficulty mode. Not only is it not really that much more difficult, but it doesn’t unlock until you have already completed the game on Normal which just adds to the monotonous repetitiveness required to get to that 100% mark.

There are another three achievements for achieving certain things on the in game arcade machines. These include playing blackjack, poker and a strange Cherokee version of Pac-Man. These are not particularly difficult but they are secret and missable. Brilliant.

Multiplayer

After you’ve done all that, that just leaves the 17 multiplayer achievements. These can be broken down into three categories; playing ranked matches (and you have to win one), getting kills and getting kills with certain weapons. The strange, and forgiving, thing about these is that you can get Deathmatch kills and Team Deathmatch kills simply by playing Team Deathmatch. You need to get 250 kills in each so it’s quite easy to grind this out and along with getting the kills with each weapon it doesn’t take too long.

The only reason that the achievements for the multiplayer are easy though, is due to the fact that there is literally no online activity for this game anymore. This means that the only way to do it is to find someone else to help you. Or use two 360 consoles. Another forgiving thing about the multiplayer is that you can get the achievements with just two players.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Prey was not an enjoyable experience for me. It’s a very forgettable first person shooter experience but that’s probably easy for me to say as first person shooters aren’t really my forte. It was praised for its original concept which I believe relates to the spirit walking aspect but it wasn’t very well utilised and in my opinion, felt very flat. It has no replay value as the multiplayer is non-existent.