The 2017 version of Prey is a reboot of an old game from 2006. The 2006 Prey had one of the best beginnings I’ve ever seen in a game with the main character in a bar which ends up with the whole room shaking and the Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper playing before the main character gets abducted and thrown into the plot (other than the beginning the 2006 Prey doesn’t stick in the memory). The 2017 Prey doesn’t have that strong or dramatic a beginning, instead opting for a slow starting mystery that didn’t really get me hooked. The rest of the plot wasn’t that interesting either.

In space no-one can hear you scream, this must be the line they used when naming the dull main character Morgan Yu. He’s an astronaut lab rat working under his brother and he has to be the hero, that’s about it.

The game then gives the player some weapons and some basic instructions while alien monsters attack the player, fairly standard as games go. The game doesn’t really improve from there, it seems like a shooter like Doom or Wolfenstein but is really is a survival game.

As a survival game it fails because the developers seem to have the idea that an enemy with lots of health is scarier which just isn’t true. A survival game should make you worry about being helpless and make you use what few items you have but the mentality Prey 2017 gave me was I’ll kill it next time.

The stars of this game are the Mimics, small alien things that can turn into everyday items. Walk past a desk and a coffee cup dives at you with four black ink-like legs ready to tear your face off. If anything should be taken from this game and put into future games or sequels then it should be these little evil things.

I did set the game to easy at one point and it became an enjoyable shooter but on as little as normal difficulty you have to collect everything or the game can feel impossible to progress through.

Overall, if you want an unreasonably punishing game where you must collect everything then this is for you but if you want either a decent shooter or a decent survival game then there’re definitely better out there. It just didn’t stand out as one of the better games I’ve played and I didn’t find it very fun, plus the main character (Morgan Yu) wasn’t very interesting..

 

The featured image is found on the Microsoft online store and depicts the main character, the space station he’s on, the moon and a weird black mess which probably represents the enemies. Pretty good artwork to represent the game.