Prey for the Xbox 360 doesn’t live up to its potential

Have you ever wondered what lies beyond the stars? That maybe, somewhere out in the darkness of space, there is another form of intelligent life just waiting to make contact with us. But instead of these extraterrestrials wanting to come in peace and share with us the secrets of the universe, they came to conquer humanity and perform strange experiments on any human they can manage to kidnap. This is the world that Prey for the Xbox 360 drops you into.

In Prey, you play as Tommy, a modern day Cherokee Indian who has lost touch with his Native American faith and heritage. Tommy lives on a reservation with his girlfriend and his grandfather, who he cares deeply for but wishes they would share his desire the leave the reservation. One night while Tommy is visiting his girlfriend at the bar she works in they hear strange reports on the radio about lights in the sky and UFO’s when suddenly, the lights begin attacking the bar and everything goes to hell.

The graphics in Prey are among the slickest you can find on the Xbox 360. Though some of the human character models look like something you would find in an original Xbox game, the enemies in Prey are quite lifelike and well designed. The environments in Prey are amazingly detailed and full of life. The spaceship you are aboard is actually one gigantic living organism and the developers of Prey did a fantastic job creating an otherworldly setting that really made you feel as if you were aboard a starship from an unknown universe.

Prey also has its own unique array of alien weaponry. Prey dismisses the standard FPS weapons in favor of living alien weapons that all have multiple modes of firing.

Prey also introduces gamers to many interesting concepts such as wall walking, portals which take the player to different parts of the ship, and many cool tricks with gravity.

Tommy also has special Cherokee spirit powers which he uses to cheat death and access areas of the ship that would normally be inaccessible to him. One spirit power in particular actually takes more away from the game than it adds. In Prey, death is not permanent for the reluctant hero, Tommy. One of Tommy’s spirit powers is death walking. When Tommy dies, he enters a strange spirit world where he must shoot demons with his bow and arrow to regain lost health and spirit energy before being dropped back into the spaceship where you died. This aspect, while original and creative, severely takes away the difficulty of this game.

For the first few hours of the game, Prey amazes gamers with its anti-gravity tricks and portal hopping around the spaceship. However, these gimmicks eventually wear thin and Prey reveals itself to be a repetitive, mediocre FPS experience that regresses into a standard, straight forward shooter. Prey has all the right tools to be an amazing, ground breaking FPS that changes the way shooters are made, but falls short of this lofty expectation. The shooting becomes repetitious, the setting becomes boring and overdone, and the gimmicks and tricks get stale.

The multiplayer in this game seemed more of an afterthought than an addition. In this modern day of ultra powerful consoles and enormous online gaming communities, Prey’s two multiplayer modes (deathmatch and team deathmatch) just don’t cut it. Plus, the multiplayer suffers from noticeable lag when the action picks up.

Overall, while Prey presents fun new aspects for the first person shooter genre to explore, this creativity just doesn’t last past the first few hours and you’re eventually left with just another first person shooter instead of the revolutionary game that Prey could be.