Prey

Ben Mansill thought that slaughtering alien hordes was supposed to be fun.

This is an FPS with a Rubik’s Cube twist – an upside down, inside out spaghetti of portals and new, improved gravity that only Escher would feel comfortable in. Prey pulls in every trick in the 3D book, and laces it with every cliché in the gaming book.

It is part Quake 4, with methodical slogging through a dark alien base, lit only by spinny plasma devices, extending bridges that go ‘zing’ and evil machines inflicting tortuous suffering upon captive screaming humans.

It is part F.E.A.R, with sudden shocking appearances of ghostly children with evil intent and echoed laughter.

It is part Matrix, with flying robotic tentacled hunters with multiple eyes, and endless arrays of evil machines harvesting humans in biomechanical pods.

It is part Doom 3, with baddies spawning not just behind you, but above you, from portals that have opened expressly to drop a bad guy right where you’re not looking.

And against this overdose of clichéd dark alien evil, it is part Turok, with an almost comically daft trailer park Indian, bestowed with the power of the spiritual ancients when all he wants to do is find his gal.



Prey often feels overwhelmingly inconsistent as a result. It’s not feature-rich, it’s element-overloaded. In trying to break into new brave design ground with Prey, the mish-mash end result is a game world that feels like it was designed by a committee that couldn’t agree on anything, and conceded to everything. I don’t think there was a strong leader on this team.