There has been lots of chatter on the web about Prey, finally the demo has been released so everyone can check it out. So today I have quite a few screen shots for you to check out and my thoughts and first impressions of the game and game play itself. So come on and check it out…

Prey Demo: First Impressions/ScreenShots

By: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

Tommy is a Cherokee garage mechanic who denies his past and is uncertain about his future. His world comes to a halt when he and his people are abducted to a menacing mothership orbiting Earth. Tommy taps his latent Cherokee spiritual powers to save himself, his girlfriend, and the planet.

Prey is a first-person shooter in which players enter a living spaceship which enslaves alien races and devours humans for lunch. Built on a heavily modded version of the Doom 3 engine, features include wall walking, gravity flipping, and intense single- and multi-player gameplay.

In Prey, gamers enter an unpredictable world where nothing can be taken for granted. You’ll become Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic stuck on a reservation, going nowhere in life. When an otherworldly crisis awakens spiritual powers from his long-forgotten birthright, he & his girlfriend are abducted by aliens who need him to save the planet — even if he’s not sure he can. Multiplayer game support that takes advantage of the unique gameplay styles in Prey Deep, emotional story of love and sacrifice based on the Hero’s Journey story structure — the same used to tell Luke Skywalker’s story in the original Star Wars

Rating: MATURE 17+

Features:

-Unique gameplay elements, such as gravity flipping, wall-walking and deathwalk, create an incredibly

original first-person shooter experience.

-Portal technology allows enemies to appear out of thin air, creating new and completely original

puzzles and gameplay techniques.

-Highly organic, living environment that is an enemy to the player.

-In single-player mode, spirit hawk allows you to decipher the spaceship’s alien language and find

advantages in battle.

-Built on an enhanced Doom 3 engine, the most impressive 3D engine used in a released game

A Better Look at Things

:

Prey offers a lot in the way of options, you can really configure Prey to your system to make it run perfectly. This is just a demo but I am assuming that the game will basically look like this for the final product as I have already seen reviews of Prey and it has already won awards.

First up the main menu, basic options are available.

Clicking on options and going straight to the video section you’ll find there are actually three sections to the video options, I have everything maxed for my system with the res set at 1280×1024. I am using a 7800GTX video card and I experienced no problems running a max settings.

The game options sub menu let’s you customize the game to your likings, you can see there is an option to turn profanity off and on. There is quite a bit of profanity in the game and I did hear a few ‘F bombs’ as well during game play.

The next set of menu options would be for the various control sets, each can be configured separately. It’s always nice to be able to re configure all the keys for game play.

For multiplayer mode, or ‘multi prey mode’ you can create your player and there are various skins available. You can also create servers and the usual find server as well to join.

Starting the game you can choose your skill level, not much to say here really…

The first level is called ‘Last Call’, and it’s set in a bar… Imagine that?!

Here we first meet Tommy who is talking to himself in the mirror about his girlfriend.

You can easily just jump into the game but I decided to walk around and check things out a bit, the first thing that really stuck out was the octagonal fire extinguisher, I have settings maxed so why is it like that?

I ran across some pictures hanging on the wall and they actually look almost real, although a bit to shiny….

Continuing on into the game you first run into your grandfather and have to sit through him talking to you about your Cherokee pride and how he feels something is going on, you as Tommy and being young really don’t want anything to do with him… Is it me or does grandpa look really one dimensional?

Walking around the bar you can interact with various things, I stopped to check out the Jukebox and there is actual music on it that you can pick from and play.

Exploring the bar a bit more you run across some video game machines, one is called Rune Man and it is basically a revamped Pac Man, and yes you can actually play all the games.

Getting back to the game we have to go and talk to our girlfriend, here you get your first weapon, a pipe wrench?! Why not just give him a crowbar?! The pipe wrench looks so small on the bar but once you get it into your hands it becomes huge. Why does your girlfriend look like and Elf, and check out grandpa in the corner, what the heck?

After chatting with your girlfriend about life and how you want to leave the reservation and she doesn’t you have some more time to explore a bit before the next part takes place. There is a TV in the corner that you can change channels on if you want, the video does look real and out of place with the TV really.

Check out the reflection in the TV in the following picture, you can see the bar and the video games, nice touch.

Back to our girlfriend, yep she still looks like an Elf, and grandpa’s a lush…

There is a small scene involving to guys at the bar that are harassing your girlfriend that you have to beat up with your pipe wrench, after you beat them up your girlfriend complain that you could have possibly killed them. During the fight you have to hit these guys quite a few times before they fall, now if I beat someone with this huge pipe wrench as many time as I had to in the game they would be dead, especially if I hit you in the head with that big ass pipe wrench, you will go down first shot…

After you cream those guys you can look around some more, I was checking out the window, it’s raining outside and the effect of the water running down the window looks pretty cool really.

And here come the aliens!

There’s not much you can do here except run around and wait to get sucked up by the aliens ‘tractor beam’.

The next section is called ‘Escape Velocity’, cool load screen anyway…

Here we go through a few minutes of hanging in some sort of transportation device. While we travel through the alien ship we can check out the scenery…

There is a point along the way where we stop and have a chat about what is going on, and of course there is the obligatory ‘I’ll get you out of here’ speech from Tommy.

As you are traveling along a bit longer eventually you come to sort of the end, you get released with the help of some guy who we never really figure out who he is, but he mentions he is your ‘brother’ and he blows up the machine holding you.

And you are free, you drop down into hole and the adventure begins.

The first aliens you run across are this little dog like things that look like something straight out of Doom.

After exploring a bit and killing more of the ‘dogs’ you find the guy who freed you lying dead, just before he dies he opens a passageway for you. To get around the alien ship you will find you use various portals of all shapes and sizes, the first you come across is a small one that you actually have to crouch to get into. Honestly I was lost for a bit here until i really paid attention and noticed that looking at the portal you can see something different, you see into another room from the back side of the portal.

Onto the next section called ‘The Downward Spiral’

In this section after actually walking around and bit a killing more aliens with your new gun you actually die. In the process of dying you are transported to the ‘land of your fathers’ basically a heaven of sorts where you run into your spirit guide and of course your grandfather is there to greet you and teach you your new skills.

That’s it for the screen shots, after you learn the skill of spirit walking which is basically an out of body experience in which you get to use a bow and arrow. The idea of spirit walking is so you can reach things in the game that you normally couldn’t, like walking through a forcefield and turning it off while in spirit form so your actual self can continue on.

Also you find that your spirit guide is now with you along for the ride, he guides you along the way by sitting on things that you need to look at or do something with, he also attacks the aliens sometimes. The bird essentially guides you along during the game and shows you the things you need to do.

Summary:

I’ll have to admit I do like first person shooters (FPS) games, I think most people do as well, it’s always nice to see a new one come out but it’s nicer to see something that introduces a new take on things as well. Prey does introduce some new elements to game play but I found it’s kind of just like playing any other FPS out there today, there really isn’t anything spectacular going on here or new. Yes I do like the background of the game based in Cherokee myth, it’s something different that tries to combine the past with the possible future but still I find it all a bit hokey.

Overall game play was smooth and the weapons are interesting, the three that you have access to in the game anyway. The graphics could be better for a brand new game but then again it is based on an engine that is over a year old now. The character graphics are a bit odd, they seem deformed like your girlfriend who looks like and Elf, or you grandfather who is just scary looking….

In all I will get the final version of Prey and see what changes have taken place if any, but I doubt anything major will change.

The multiplayer aspect of the game is your basic multiplayer game with the addition of things from Prey, it sort of reminds me of UT2K4, while the interface for accessing the multiplayer games reminds me of Battlefield2.

Prey is very playable, and should do very well as a multiplayer game mainly because it offers players something different than other games out there. In the end though it all still feels like a re-hash or combination of games already available.