Forum Overview :: Prey
 
The 2006 version is just awful by Rafiki 08/22/2021, 4:36pm PDT
You can't really buy it anymore, so I guess that's a positive. I managed to get a key from some website Jonesy mentioned because I tried to get it in a sale a long time ago but it sold out somehow. The other positive is that you can finish it in [checks Steam] 5.4 hours. Much less if you just rush, I'm sure.

Most of why it's terrible is covered by Jerry in this thread. It's all true. The game is one big, long, narrow metallic corridor covered with turds and flesh. There's no challenge at all. The portals are utterly pointless, they're just doorways. The one moment that everyone mentions everywhere, where you go through a portal to find yourself shrunk down onto a tiny rock inside a display case with a now-gigantic enemy staring at you from the outside, hints at what could have been some really exciting level design, but is the only real creativity in the game. There's a couple of moments that are technologically and visually impressive for the time, but overall there's not much to see. There is a LOT of copy-pasting sections in the levels. I'm assuming the people working on this had 6 months to create levels after someone resurrected the IP, because to assume they had more is just embarrassing.

The weapons are neither exciting nor interesting. Here are all the weapons:

- wrench
- machine gun
- sniper rifle
- grenade
- mine
- plasma rifle
- rail gun
- chain gun
- grenade launcher
- shotgun
- rocket launcher
- a more boring version of Duke 3D's freeze gun
- Half-Life's gluon gun


It's a stock FPS loadout, they just try to trick you into thinking they did something new by giving all the guns a fleshy, alien look and making the shotgun shoot a blast of acid (?) instead of bullets. As far as the actual combat, I don't know if it was a technological limitation of the time or what, but the developers went to great pains to make sure you were never attacked by more than three enemies at a time. That's not an exaggeration, either. It became so obvious I started counting, and I never counted more than three at once. Most of the time it was no more than two.

Jerry says he can't prove that the puzzles aren't even interesting by 2006 standards, but that's easy to prove just by playing the game. They're pretty bad. Like I said before, the portals are all just doorways so there's not even a puzzle there. The spirit-walking puzzles are for babies. With spirit walking you shift into a ghost, leaving your body behind and allowing you to walk through forcefields and interact with limited terminals / switches. You can then press a button to be instantly teleported back into your body. This probably could have led to some pretty complex and creative puzzles. The most creative it gets, though, is having to click two buttons within about 1 second of one another, or another puzzle involving having to travel up 3 elevators but the elevator buttons are out of reach of your body. So you leave your body on the elevator platform, walk your ghost across the room to the button, then teleport back to your body. Repeat twice. The rest of the time you shift into spirit-walking form to walk 10 feet through a forcefield to click a button to turn off the forcefield, or walk 10 feet through laser sensors to click a button that turns off a sentry gun. That those two puzzles show up at the very beginning of the game as a training exercise to get you accustomed to spirit-walking is fine. That they still show up repeatedly late in the game is dumb.

There's a couple of gravity shifting puzzles that change which direction gravity is flowing (ie. from the floor to the ceiling or the walls) that are kind of clever, but mostly flipping gravity just means you hit a dead end so you flip the gravity to continue on in the one direction it's possible to move.

Honestly, since the game is over in ~5 hours, it kind of feels like it only has time to establish the basics and then just ends before it really has any time to explore all of the different components of the game in any complexity. If you never played this, you haven't missed anything.



BONUS ART DIRECTION: Someone apparently said they wanted a sinister fusion of technology and biology, and that translated into a spaceship decorated with doorframes with teeth, dirty buttholes, and vaginas. So I guess it's like if Earth was invaded by some kind of intergalactic Ed Gein. That actually sounds kind of scary, and maybe could have been in more competent hands.









BOO!
NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
The 2006 version is just awful by Rafiki 08/22/2021, 4:36pm PDT NEW
    My expectations when I played it were very loooooooooow by Ice Cream Jonsey 08/23/2021, 9:35am PDT NEW
    The most offensive thing about Prey is the story. by Jerry Whorebach 08/23/2021, 1:47pm PDT NEW
        It was a squandered opportunity. Prey's story was the story of Prey. by Jerry Whorebach 08/23/2021, 2:44pm PDT NEW
            Re: It was a squandered opportunity. Prey's story was the story of Prey. by MM 08/23/2021, 4:45pm PDT NEW
                See this is what I'm saying, female monsters are usually still very fuckable. by Jerry Whorebach 08/23/2021, 5:09pm PDT NEW
                    Can't find a clip, but there was the cow monster transform in Tromeo and Juliet. NT by MM 08/23/2021, 5:19pm PDT NEW
                        Here. by MM 08/23/2021, 5:21pm PDT NEW
                            That's right on the edge. I'm going to have to watch this movie. NT by Jerry Whorebach 08/23/2021, 5:37pm PDT NEW
                                Imagine this blonde cow lady as a basketball bouncing on the rim of my penis. NT by Jerry Whorebach 08/23/2021, 5:44pm PDT NEW
 
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