HorrorTober 2017 - Prey (Xbox 360)

Stop #3 on the tour this year brings us to a Cherokee Reservation as an alien abduction occurs taking a number of the town's residents and a bar with it. Let's see how life is on The Sphere.

The Story

Prey begins with Tommy in the bathroom of his girlfriends bar on the Cherokee Reservation. Tommy wants to live his life outside of the reservation, and tries convincing his girlfriend to leave with him, instead starting a fight between the two. A fist fight breaks out between Tommy and two of the bar patrons, which he ends up victorious, before a green light begins pulsing around and through the bar. Everything gets pulled upwards, and Tommy blacks out before waking up on an alien ship, strapped to something next to his girlfriend, Jen, and his grandfather. While the three are being transported somewhere else on the ship, a mysterious figure sets off an explosion that frees Tommy who must now contend with the ship and it's inhabitants. He works his way through the ship, witnessing the death of his grandfather, he pushes on hoping to save Jen and get them out of whatever hell they've wound up in. 

The Controls

As a first person shooter, Prey's controls are fairly common. The joysticks move and control the aiming, triggers perform light (right) and strong (left) attacks, while the bumpers allow you to scroll through your inventory of weapons or you can program them to the D-Pad buttons. If you have a gun equipped, the right trigger fires while the left swaps to a zoom aim. Lastly, the main button interface is where you jump, crouch, throw grenades, and use Tommy's Spirit Walk, which I will explain below. Again, fairly common control setup for a first person shooter game.

The Gameplay

Prey doesn't take long to thrust you into the dark action on The Sphere. It's a very linear game, and you're not given really any opportunities for exploring alternate paths. All you can do is press forwards, into the depths of the organic ship, combating it's inhabitants as you try and fight to your freedom. 

The game is broken up into chapters, and there's really no objective specific to each one. Your one objective throughout is to get off the ship alive. Anything that gets in your way needs to be cleared out so you can push on. And while journeying through the ship you'll come across two main things : enemies, and portals. 

All of the aliens present of The Sphere are instantly your enemy (except for the mysterious stranger who freed you). You meet them very quickly, and are also introduced to their arsenal of weapons which become yours in your seemingly infinite inventory, as every weapon you pick up stays with you. There's also grenades available to you, and they come in the form of little alien bugs essentially. You rip there legs off, throw the bodies, and watch for the boom!

Prey's main mechanic is one you will encounter everywhere you go on the ship : portals. Some of these are fixed in specific locations, while others are created by the aliens on board the ship (unfortunately you yourself can't create any portals). You can walk through these, or if you happen to see any enemies on the other side you can shoot through the portal and clear your path before going through yourself. The fixed portals will remain open, allowing you to travel back through for cover or to recover health if need be, while most of the ones created by the aliens will break as soon as you cross. 

One of the smaller mechanics in Prey is the gravity paths. There are some areas that have lit up portions of the ground/wall/ceiling that you are able to walk across. No matter which way it winds and loops, you will always stay oriented to the path, allowing you to reach higher up places when there's nowhere else to go. However if anything at all causes you to break contact of your feet with the ground, which ever way is supposed to be down, you will fall. So don't jump unless you know you'll be fine. 

The last thing in Prey is what I mentioned up in the controls section : Spirit Walk. (Or Death Walk). In Prey, you never actually "die". With Tommy's Cherokee heritage, any time you are killed you are brought to a sort of after life, where you can be guided back to where you met your demise on the Sphere. There are fixed points in the game where you are supposed to die, obviously to learn this mechanic. In doing so, you learn to Spirit Walk, where you can project Tommy's spirit out from his body. This becomes useful in both The Sphere and the afterlife realm when there are objects (such as fire) that you need to cross but are unable to do so in your physical form. Tommy's spirit can go forth and make the path for you.

The Challenge (or lack thereof?)

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot to challenge you in this game. Your only real hurdle in this game is the enemies, both normal and bosses, and these are barely over an easy challenge. The bosses might be closer to moderate, but just barely. All your enemies are off the bullet-sponge form (i.e., nothing specific to take them down just shoot). The bosses even come with their own big health bars so you can see how well you're faring against them. 

Everything else in the game takes almost no effort at all. Whenever your path reaches a "dead end" there's always a portal or gravity-path, and they're never difficult to find. But let's talk about the good and bad from this game and then we can pin the nail on it.

PROS

 - Cherokee Heritage. I'm not personally one who knows all these things about different cultures/religions/peoples. But after doing a bit of reading up on this game, it was one thing that stood out, how they incorporated Tommy's Cherokee beliefs and lifestyle into his character and the game. Again, it's never been an area that I've personally been fascinated, so I'm sure the beliefs were stretched and tweaked to fit with how they wanted the game to play out, but even so you can tell that they wanted the heritage to be just as much a part of the game as everything else.

- Portals Without A Gun. Everyone who hears portals in relation to video games instantly thinks of the actual Portal game (naturally). Prey, however, made use of their portal system over a full calendar year before Valve's Portal was released. Granted the Valve version is more involved with you creating and placing the portals  yourself, but 2K did a great job using it in Prey the way they did. It might have brought a little more depth to the gameplay if you'd gotten the ability to create the portals yourself, but it is still a lot of fun being able to fight through them, killing enemies in a completely different area.

CONS 

- Too Easy. There's no challenge to the gunplay in this game, other than how well and fast you can aim. The enemies do manage to make use of cover in the environment, and they'll fire enough to make you think they've locked on pretty good. But other than, there's nothing really challenging about it and it leaves Prey feeling like an empty shell, your only task being to fire bullets.

- Lacking Variety. One thing that upset me the most playing this was not seeing a huge variety of alien enemies. I mean, I get it to a point, they're on a ship and not a whole planet so there won't be a LOT of different kinds. But still it hardly feels like there's any at all. The enemies you do see all look and feel like soldier types which, again, makes sense, yet the game ends up feeling stale after a few chapters.

Final Verdict 

In my opinion, Prey is one of those games that sits perfectly in the middle ground. There's nothing about it that makes it super amazing, but there's also nothing that makes it horrible enough to blacklist either. It's a fun shooter with an interesting story, and the portal mechanics are so enjoyable. The depth of this game feels a little lacking, but not in the sense of completely ruining the game. If anything it will just make you shy away from long binge sessions of playing Prey. And for a game that you can pick up for only $5 (GameStop or other) you definitely can't go wrong for the price.

Horror Level
There's not a whole lot of jump scariness to this game. If anything is going to be creepy/eerie it will most definitely be the atmosphere on The Sphere. Everywhere you go there are giant machines that look like they were built just to mast people into a bloody pulp. The only really peaceful "happy" areas of the game are the interactive bar in the beginning, and when you visit the "Afterlife" realm when Tommy dies. So the horror from this one isn't really in your face, but everything around you can definitely be unsettling.

What's Next? We've got one more review left for HorrorTober 2017, so let's see how scary of a note we end on! I've got some fun stuff planned for after the horror games, I'm looking to review Max Payne 3, Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker, and a handful of other stuff!

Also, if you'd like to check out some gameplay for Prey, here's a link to my YouTube video which was clipped from my stream of this game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgTTz9eGD4Q