Prey: Huge Hands-On & Hi-Res Media

Kikizo goes hands-on with Human Head's evolutionary FPS, Prey. Here's our massive hands-on report, plus gorgeous new hi-res gameplay videos and screens.

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Multi Preyer (sorry)

Prey is technologically built on an enhanced Doom 3 Engine, which now sees considerably larger environments and a greater variety of indoor and outdoor locales than found in id's baby. This also extends into multiplayer mode, which on first impression is a highly enjoyable and very chaotic shooter that actually left this particular writer with post-game adrenaline shakes.

After coming in respectable positions and winning one death match against a few seasoned FPS-playing journos, I can confidently state that the game reminded me of Quake 3 Arena in physical feel, but with a few layers more of tactical flavour.

When you kill foes in death match, you get spirit energy to fill the spirit gauge. You also have all the single player bell and whistles rooted in the multiplayer levels, including gravity fields, gravity switches, portals, vehicles and all the weapons you've come to know and love. Of course, each level is balanced out for gameplay's sake and in the handful we played - 8 player standard deathmatch - they each seemed to focus on a small number of ideas that worked really well, rather than just trying to cram the lot in one big lump.

One level was a maze made up of gravity switches and magnetic platforms, which meant battles were taking place on walls, ceilings and anywhere that a foot could fit on.

Another level was a huge hangar bay suspended between two buildings. Two or three vehicles are made available and bridges allow players to pass between buildings. The battle here tends to become spaceships versus humans and was pretty exciting, though a sense of imbalance did fill the air, though that could simply be inexperience with the game's mechanics talking.

What particularly struck me about the whole deathmatch experience, was the feeling that it will take a while before the full potential of all the game's mechanics combined is truly realised in a deathmatch scenario. In the closing game, I ended up in a small room intensely shooting away in a four-man skirmish. And then it hit me "what if I left the room, hid behind a wall and came in invisibly as the spirit. Could I beat all these guys without putting myself at risk?" Sadly, I couldn't find out, as that was the last game of the day.

360 Degrees of Separation

Or three weeks. The Xbox 360 version is being built alongside the PC version and is only three weeks behind it in terms of development, which is definitely a confidence booster for the team and Take 2 getting this game out for simultaneous release on both systems, which was confirmed to be their goal.

The 360 version is said to be pixel perfect to its PC counterpart, 720p resolution will be available and the team is aiming to fully optimise the frame rate by its time of release.

As for exclusive content, Xbox Live will see extra skins and currently unconfirmed extra content for the game. Tim Gerritson says there will be potential for PC MOD community produce seeing it's way to the machine, but only through a strict approvals process, as Microsoft has a policy on allowing freely uploadable content due to the possibility of offensive mateials becoming accessible to minors.

And finally, the boring stuff - PC specs. Here are the current recommended specs for your PC to run this exceptionally sexy game: 2 Ghz, 384 MB Ram, GeForce 4. Or 2 Ghz and 384 MB Ram with Direct X 9 and a Geforce 6 or Radeon 4. Otherwise, it runs fine, just without shaders.

Verdict

We don't usually make such bold judgements on a game before playing through the whole thing, but in this case, sheer gut feeling tells us Prey will be very special - and essential - for any action gamer. Human Head is a name you'd better start getting used to hearing... Half What?

Daniel Boutros
Contributor, Kikizo.com

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