My review of Prey Demo

[Wizaro]

Me: 38 year old, long time gamer, typically prefer RPGs (Oblivion), Simulations (Silent Hunter III), tactical level strategy games (Myth: The Fallen Lords) and some, but very few, FPS games (everything Half-Life, Farcry).

I'm a picky bastard when it comes to games and although I install and try out 90% of AAA game demos, I wind up uninstalling 90% of them after 10-20 mins of play time (Titan Quest demo being the latest straight to Recycle Bin winner.)

Prey is the first demo of 2006 that I played to completion and thoroughly enjoyed.

The good:
+ Graphics are fantastic and smooth as silk on my mid-range system (specs posted below)
+ Production values are overall very solid
+ Unique gameplay (spirit mode, gravity shifts, etc)
+ Engrossing story line (too early to say for sure, but darn good so far)
+ Sound Quality and 3d positional coding is well done.
+ Great atmosphere, level design, and immersion (so far)
+ Adult content - yipee!!
+ Options menu prompted me to update my soundcard drivers (AlOpen) and provided a direct link (nice touch and hopefully a trend starter for other developers)

The Not So Good:
- Voice acting and script for main protagonist leaves something to be desired (other characters and NPCs is quite good)
- Music stutters badly during level loads
- level load time is a longer than HL and not nearly as seemless as Farcry and some other FPS's.
- No option for mouse pointer speed/sensitivity (that I could find)
- Default difficulty seems too low (might be a demo only issue or early missions phenomenon)
- In game physics/world item interactivity/damage models seems inconsistent.

Overall I really, really liked this Demo and Prey is now on my soon to be released MUST BUY list, which is indeed, a short list (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars the only other game on list).

I'm so confident in the quality and soon to be realized success of this game that I will probably buy some Take Two stock on Monday.

Kudos to 3d Realms and Human head!

Wizaro

System Specs:
Intel P4 3.2 (overclocked to 3.6)
Sapphire x850 GTO2 256mb vid card (OCed as well)
X-FI Xtreme Music Soundcard
1 GB PC3200 Geil Ram
WD Raptor Hard Drives

[FrozeN91]

I pretty much agree on everything except I like the voice-acting and the loading times are much better then Half Life IMHO. Hl loaded like, every fifth minute :p

PS: Adult content is fun ;)
I'm not an adult though :doh:

[Damien_Azreal]

There is a mouse sensitivity setting, does take a little looking around to find it though.
I found level load to be very fast and smooth, also difficulty is locked for the demo. Full game will have an auto dfficulty system (think SiN: Emergence).

I also liked Tommy's voice overs. Felt good to play as a chracter that had some personality and commented on what he saw. Added to the game and atmosphere IMO. I was worried about the voice acting by an earlier video, but hearing in context and in action made it much better.

But nice review.

[OnyxBMW]

In relation to the bad, I loved the voice acting for the main character. It was realistic, angry, and I always found that when he said something like "this **** is ****** up" followed by a "no, this is ****** up" I always managed to think the same thing and get a good laugh out of it.

The music for me does not stutter at all.

The level load times for me are perfectly fine, less than 20 seconds at the high end, sometimes less than 10, more than bearable considering the graphics.

The mouse pointer speed/sensetivity is found in the game options tab under the "feel" sub-tab (the sub-tabs are on the left of the menu if you didn't know)

The default difficulty is also an adaptive difficulty, under the same feel option you can dissable it and all enemies will have a pre-set, unchanging AI. The current option is to not need a difficulty setting so anyone can pick up the game and play it and it will be just as hard as they need it to be.

The damage models on physics objects isn't horrible imo, but I also don't generally throw physics related objects at people.

Though, have to agree with everything else.

AMD 64 3200+ (2.2 ghz)
Radeon x1600 pro agp
X-Fi Xtreme Music
2x512MB Patriot DDR2


This is an awesome game. I generally don't like horror games, but this game is just that good. Awesome job guys, awesome job.

It has a few bugs (I had to revert back to catalyst 6.4 for all the portal/mirror issues were fixed) but beyond that this is just a great game. One for the record books.

[avatar_58]

This is an awesome game. I generally don't like horror games, but this game is just that good. Awesome job guys, awesome job.


Prey is a horror game? :confused:

[OnyxBMW]

horror themed?

I'm noticing a lot of cross-genre archetypes in prey.

The environment is clearly horror, but suspense is there as well, some survival exists, action/adventure is there too, but I'm pretty sure it falls into the "horror" genre but not for the fact that the environment itself is designed to scare you ALA Doom 3.

[Wizaro]

Let me clarify a few points in my review that some of you have responded to:

- In an FPS game, what your avatar sees is what YOU see, what he hears is what YOU hear. If you try to add to that mix, what the avatar is THINKING and voicing out loud, you really risk breaking the immersiveness that for me personally is the most important component of a game of this nature. It's a very personal preference and a developer's choice and I fall into the "No Talking Avatar" camp.

*Duke Nukem is an example of a great FPS game where the avatar speaks (which I think is also 3d Realms game so it's no surprise Prey does it.)
*Half-Life is an example of a non-verbal avatar.

I think Half-Life and HL2 is the best FPS game/s of all time and I think that is partly due to the immersiveness realized by not having the game developers trying to guess what me, the player, might be thinking, voicing it out loud, and risking a serious break in the fantasy that this is really me in the game world. Gordan's voice, both his inner voice (and sometimes his OUTSIDE voice!) is me and only me, and I prefer that approach.

- Prey does indeed have a longer duration BETWEEN load times than Half-Life 2 which is a good thing, it just seems to me that when it does load, it's takes longer. The load time is not a game breaker at all and nothing like loading a map on BF2 (which is rediculous.) In fact, it may indeed be about the same or even shorter than HL and maybe it's just perception because of the HUGE load bar on the screen as opposed to HLs much smaller loading graphic.

- The music stuttering for me, only happens during loading, not during game play.

- Thanks for pointing out the mouse pointer option :)

Love the demo, gonna buy the game, gonna tell others to buy it.

Wizaro