Before I start, I do have to note, that there is another Prey game as well. In 2006, 3D Realms released a pretty solid shooter with the same name. It was, just like Arkane Studios' Prey, a sci-fi game, but it starred a native American Tommy, who ends up being abducted by aliens along with his whole reservation. It is a good game, but sadly enough, it's not available through any digital outlets. If you manage to find it from somewhere, I do recommend getting it.
Morgan Yu, either male or female depending on how you prefer, has joined to TranStar research after their brother Alex recruited them. The research of the bizarre Typhon creatures takes place on a space station Talos 1, where the company can do whatever they want in the terms of research. But on one morning, things seem off. Morgan takes part in a simple physical examination, which ends up with a Typhon Mimic attacking one of the scientists. Again, Morgan wakes up the same morning only to find out, that they have been placed in a simulation looping the time before recruitment. The simulation was running on Talos 1, which is now overrun by the Typhons.
January, an artificial intelligence residing inside an operator robot, contacts Morgan to inform, that it was built by them as a safeguard. Morgan has left a message from themselves, stating, that Alex might have betrayed them. Now the Typhons are loose and it's up to Morgan to stop the alien creatures from reaching Earth.
Perhaps more interesting than the game itself is the alternative history it provides. In the universe of Prey, the Soviet Union is the first to stumble upon the Typhon aliens with their Vorona 1 satellite. Soviets end up fighting and capturing the aliens with the help of the United States and in secret, they begin to study them at space station Kletka. Decades later TranStar buys Kletka and turns it into Talos 1, where they continue the research in an unethical manner.
This alternative history is reflected upon the visuals as well as in the narratives you find littered all around the station. For those, who want to dig deeper into the history of the world of Prey, there's a lot of reading material to be found.
The closest point of comparison to Prey would be System Shock. You take a role of a lone survivor, at least seemingly so in the beginning. You do encounter other survivors later in the game and it is up to you if you want to save them or not. Talos 1 is filled with enemies, both the alien kind as well as robots corrupted by them. There are other dangers as well and you can choose rather freely on how you encounter them. Attacking head-on is not always the smartest choice, often stealth is a good option. At times it pays to just try and find a way around.
Morgan can improve their skills by using neuromods, the tech resulted from the Typhon research. Neuromods provide powerful PSI abilities and other enhancements, allowing you to tackle the problems at hand in the way that fits you the best. You can even evolve Typhon abilities on Morgan, but that can lead to problems with the Talos 1 automated security, which is targetting the Typhons. If Morgan embraces the Typhon abilities too keenly, the security sees them as alien as well.
While Talos 1 has been divided into several sections, the main emphasis is on free exploration. The main objectives are given to you by January, but the exploration reveals more secondary goals to tackle. Those are found from datalogs and messages sent by the employees of Talos as well as given to you by the survivors or the Typhon infestation. Some of these side missions are just quests for additional loot that can be helpful in keeping you alive, others have deeper moral choices, like if you want to risk your own life and resources in helping a survivor who needs her medication within 15 minutes or she'll die. Prey has several different endings, so, as you'd expect, these secondary quest lines do have an effect.
Surviving the Typhons requires all kinds of equipment. There are only a handful of firearms, but they can be enhanced with mod kits. You do have to preserve some ammo though, so it's rarely advisable to Doom situations out. Gloo gun is an important tool to carry, as it can be used to immobilize enemies, stop environmental hazards like fire and electricity and open up ways to unreachable places. Gloo shots can form climbable appendages on walls, so used right, it's possible to create new paths this way.
Finding the equipment is not the only way of obtaining them. Throughout Talos 1, you can find recycling and replication machinery, which can be used in creating stuff. Recyclers can be used in turning unnecessary stuff into raw materials, which then can be used in replicators for scarce things. There are several manufacturing recipes scattered around Talos, so towards the end, you can replicate more or less all you need, given if you have enough materials.
All in all, Prey is a pretty solid System Shock-like. It isn't an open-world game in the same way as something like Skyrim is, but it still allows you a lot of freedom in how you approach the problems at hand and there's a lot of freedom in how you move around the space station. If you unlock all the airlocks, you can even move between locations in spacewalks. These spacewalks also provide you with an ample opportunity to search the hull breached areas of Talos 1 for more loot and missions objectives.
Mooncrash offers more of the same with the main game, but with a twist. The twist is, that you are an employer of a rivalling corporation KASMA, who is given access to data gathered from a Typhon attack on a moonbase. You have to solve a series of objectives playing as different people with different skills. While the moonbase is the same for everyone, they can meet different enemies and have a more difficult time accessing certain locations. There's a time limit as well, as the data you access is slowly corrupted, so there's a need to reset it from time to time. It's a kind of a Groundhog Day scenario.
There's a bigger emphasis on survival gameplay in Mooncrash, as now you have to adapt your gameplay according to whom you play. Unlike in the main game, the characters are now more tied to their roles, so they can't become jacks of all trades. For example, a security guard doesn't have deep skills in PSI powers, but a "volunteer test subject" fares better on PSI powers, but less so in physical strength.
Mooncrash is a standalone game despite it being DLC. You can play it whenever you want, as there's nothing you need to know about the main story. It is a self-contained and smaller-scale experience, which asks you to play it repeatedly until you've managed to solve all the KASMA objectives. While it is fun to a degree, I can't say I liked it as much as I liked the main game, but if you don't mind scrubbing the same locations with 5 different character builds, it should provide an entertaining playthrough.
Prey is available through most of the usual stores. GOG for a DMR free version, Steam for those who don't care in one way or another. It's also available for PS4 and XboxOne.
Comments
Post a Comment