Worthwhile Reviews: Prey (Collector's Edition) | X360 | $24.99 | New

Prey is a first-person shooter built on Id's Doom 3 engine. While I didn't care for Doom 3's gameplay, the engine was solid and is used to great effect here. There are still a lot of hallways and confined places, but Prey adds enough into the mix to keep it from feeling as repetitious. More on those additions later.

You'll experience the game through the eyes of Tommy Hawk, but just forget the last name and think of him as Tommy, because his full name must have been decided by the developers during happy hour. Tommy is a disaffected Cherokee man who's fed up with life on the reservation and wants to go somewhere--anywhere--else. The problem (or at least the excuse, if you pick up on the implications that Tommy is as scared of the unknown world as he is sick of the familiar one) is that he can't convince his girlfriend Jen to leave with him.

During all this angst, aliens suddenly invade Earth and capture Tommy, Jen and Tommy's wise old grandfather. Hung up and hauled around like a side of beef, Tommy sees his grandfather killed gruesomely before his eyes and receives covert aid from an unknown source enabling him to escape. Loose and pissed-off, Tommy begins to search through the alien ship/station for Jen and for answers.

Grandfather isn't out of the picture yet, though, and counsels Tommy from beyond the grave a la Obi-Wan. The first thing Grandfather's spirit teaches Tommy is how to separate his own spirit from his body. This Spirit-Walk mechanic allows you to leave your body at will and scout ahead or pass through barriers that would stop you physically. It also makes you immortal, since taking too much damage will merely send you to the spirit realm, where some quick target practice will restore you to health.

Being alien in origin, the level design is unusual. First, there is meat and tissue everywhere. The walls are as likely to be made of pulsating flesh as metal, and the aliens' entire reason for abducting humans is to process them into food. The aliens in Prey also have a very different take on interior design, with walkways that wander up walls and across ceilings (similar to the magnetic walkways in the Ratchet and Clank series), switches that can change the direction of gravity, and portals that may also change which way is down when you walk through them.

These are my favorite elements in Prey. A few times while teleporting around, spirit walking to flip a switch that would carry my body over a chasm, and changing gravity as if I were rolling around on the inside of a giant Rubik's cube, I felt slightly dizzy and disoriented. If you have motion-sickness issues, I very much doubt this is the game for you, but overall I enjoyed the feeling. I think I gave whatever parts of the brain handle spatial perception a much-needed workout, too.

I wish there had been more of that kind of thing that there was, though. Most of the game is walking down narrow hallways and shooting aliens. There's certainly nothing wrong with that idea, but the execution here is a little dull. Not Doom 3 dull, but not tremendously exciting. None of the weapons really stand out, the enemies aren't very challenging, and even if you get overmatched, you'll only have to spend a few moments in the spirit world before returning to the fray.

The visuals, as could be expected from a game running the Doom 3 engine, are quite good and the art style is consistent and interesting. Aside from some very forced-sounding swearing from Tommy, the dialog is done well (including some great cameos by Art Bell as himself), and the story is interesting enough if you're a sci-fi nerd like myself. Also, as a vegetarian, I couldn't help see the implications of human meat-harvesting. Being hung immobilized and watching the people ahead of you brutally slaughtered, knowing that your turn is coming, is a terrifying fate--no less so whether it is a human or another animal being treated thus. Perhaps seeing humans treated like farm animals will get people thinking about how they treat farm animals. But probably not.

My Collector's Edition also came with a metal case and a pair of pewter figures. The figures are fine, but uninteresting enough that I've never removed them from the plastic tray they're in, and the metal case is not the sleek, nicely hinged affair you get with the collectors editions of Halo 2, Doom 3, or Perfect Dark Zero, but rather an unwieldy and oversized job with a peg sticking out of the bare metal to hold the disk in place. I got it for the same price as the regular edition, which is good, because I certainly wouldn't have paid anything extra for it--and I'm usually a sucker for a metal case.

So was it worth my $25? Yes.... but its very close. Prey isn't a bad game at all, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend that someone play it, but it might be one of those games you're better off renting. The experience is relatively quick and unchallenging, and its not something I'm sure you're going to want to play through again anytime soon. My predilection for sci-fi pushed it over to the sunny side of worthwhile for me, but only just.