Prey (2006)

Prey is really cool so far. The start is scary and exciting - you start off in a shitty bar, getting in a fight with the locals, then suddenly the power goes off, Blue Oyster Cult starts playing on the jukebox and everyone and everything is getting hoisted into a massive spaceship where fellow abductees quickly get gored by massive machinery. It's doing very well at creating an alien atmosphere - anti-grav paths, portals (which can lead to weird scale differences), massive, toxic-poo-spewing bumholes, weird weapons, not to mention the Cherokee spirit-walking layered on top - without overwhelming the player. Having said that, I do seem to have come afoul of some gravity-flipping and hit a dead end, so I'll have to reload an autosave and see if that's the case.

And I just realised that as this is in DooM3's engine, I may be able to fiddle about with the graphics settings like I did with that game...

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I'm about halfway through and still very much enjoying it. It looks great and there's loads of attention to detail (enemies turning off anti-grav walkways while you're on them in a firefight, the idle animation on your weapon where a little eye stalk protudes and stares at you, using a severed alien hand to open doors, the broadcasts coming from Earth as people call in to a talk radio station with reports of weird stuff happening, your spirit animal attacking enemies so you can shoot them while they try to swipe it away) and some sweet environmental story-telling, like suddenly hearing "Barracuda" by Heart in the middle of this spaceship and then realising they've abducted the entirety of your bar, before grav-flipping into it for a fire-fight, or seeing an entire airliner get abducted (which the abandoned Prey 2 was planning to use as its protagonist's back-story).

The revival minigame is actually quite fun because you get a little shooting gallery. There's only been one instance when I've opted for quick-load instead, which was where I thought I had to do some precision platforming and kept falling to my death, so I just wanted to retry as quickly as possible (turned out it was a spirit-walk puzzle for which I needed some spirit ammo, so ironically I actually did need to kill myself and go through the mini-game).

It's still currently throwing new stuff at me (ghost children! One-man shuttles you can fly about the place and tractor-beam massive objects around with! Using forcefields in a new way to chop a boss' gun-hand off and use it against it!), so currently I'm happy. It may be that it runs dry around here and the second half is utterly repetitive, we'll see.

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Alright, I finished it. It definitely dragged towards the end, mainly thanks to some bullet-sponge mini-bosses and mildly irritating puzzle-based boss fights where you can't avoid getting shot at while you try to figure shit out. And yeah, it does get a little repetitive although a few more new things got dropped in, like the asteroids you can walk all the way around. In retrospect, I think the revival mini-game is a bit of a band-aid over the fact that you're going to die a lot because the level design and shooting don't really match up - there's not a lot of cover to use and yet the enemies are really tough, so it's easy to get pinned down in a corner or take a while to figure out from which direction you're getting shot at. The shooting was intermittently fun, though, and at least they did create that band-aid - I probably would have rage-quit pretty early on without it, but as it was I never got too stressed out. And it never gets old having a firefight on an anti-grav walkway and watching the enemies tumble upwards when you kill them.

Story-wise, it continued to do some cool stuff. It felt very Valve quite often, especially when you're making your way upwards through the alien spire (which I think they may even have called the Citadel) while the female-voiced antagonist mocks you and moves level tiles around you to create new paths, or jumping in and out of vehicles to solve little puzzles (and this is aside from the orange and blue portals essentially identical to those in Valve's game from a year later). The female characters tick pretty much all the tropes - the damsel in distress, the sexualised exotic priestess, the bare-breasted alien mother with an HR Giger thing coming out of her stomach - and the damsel eventually gets melded with a monster which you have to defeat, at which point she begs you to kill her. Depending on how much credit you want to give the game, though, there's potentially some clever metaphor and foreshadowing going on, where Tommy's wish to 'rescue' Jen from their reservation and way of life to be assimilated by American culture (despite her telling him she doesn't want that) is mirrored as she is abducted and eventually turned into a monster by the alien race that comes in and literally takes their land away from them. The main antagonist is revealed to be an Uncle Tom figure, who assimilated with the aliens and wants Tommy to do the same. It's also really effective when the aliens start to invade the spirit realm - it's unexpected and feels like a real violation, and the ensuing extended firefight has Tommy screaming in anger as you mow down a wave of enemies. (There's also some ancient astronaut stuff which doesn't really fit in with all this but is cool nonetheless.)

It definitely is style over substance but it's solid and interesting enough that it overcomes the rough edges.

Rating: Green.