Vivek’s Blog

I’m back to doing what I do best - playing FPSes. OK, so I was exaggerating. But rest assured, what you are about to read is no exaggeration and every word of it indeed true. Go on, try it. I ain’t lying.

So, yesterday was the big day - the Prey demo was released. At 449MB, it’s smaller than the F.E.A.R. but offers more game time than F.E.A.R. did. The game hits stores on July 12 and I’m grateful that Human Head Studios/3D Realms decided to release the demo before that. I was really doubting whether or not my system could handle Prey after watching some of those jaw-dropping trailers. Well, the good news is that Prey ran. The bad news is that there’s a bit of stutter at my current 800×600/Medium settings. I should probably scale the audio back down to Default rather than OpenAL. But damn, OpenAL sounds so much better.

The Prey demo offers over 30 minutes of game time (more if you take your time exploring) and is engrossing from the very first scene. For a while you do nothing but learn that your character, Tommy, has no guts to tell this girl that he likes her. He wants her to come with him and leave the Reservation. A fight erupts when a couple of drunks at the bar start hitting on the girl. You turn saviour and kill the two guys with a wrench. Immediately after, all hell breaks loose and you get sucked into an alien ship along with your grandfather and the girl. From then on, it’s a sequence that will blow you away. If you have a high-end rig, things will look pretty as you are taken to a certain point in the ship. A guy helps you break lose and you start your adventure aboard the ship to save your girl and your grandfather. As luck would have it, your grandfather dies in front of your eyes. Hah! The girl doesn’t die…at least not yet.

Gore is plenty and the ship has been given an organic feel - there are elements that are alive. You spend some time with your trusty wrench before you kill a guard and get hold of his gun. The weapons in this game are fairly unique. They too are ALIVE. I won’t spoil the fun but they are fun to use. The HUD is kept to a minimum - you just get a health indicator on the lower left and an ammo indicator on the lower right.

At a point in the game, you die. You are then taken to the land of your ancestors where you learn to “Spirit-Walk.” A hawk called Talon acts as a guide for the rest of the game. Spirit-Walk basically involves you getting out of your mortal body and with a bow in hand, you can walk through energy force fields to kill and/or deactivate fields on the other side. Your bow is charged using souls of the dead.

There are a lot of weird things happening aboard the ship and you will get to see some in this demo. Tim Buckley from ctrlaltdel-online.com thinks that this game is somewhere between Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 and I think I agree. It isn’t as jumpy as Doom3, but provides enough thrills to keep you entertained. The weapons distinguish this game from other shooters. Spirit-Walk is pretty handy. If you die at any point, you must kill some flying ghostly things to return back to the place and time you died. So if you die in the middle of a fight, you will return at the precise location and time that you died such that you return to the same fight right after you were supposed to have died.

The game autosaves although with the short length and coming back from the dead system, you shouldn’t need the save points. The demo also includes some online gameplay and is worth checking out. They call the multiplayer mode “MultiPrey.”

Go ahead and download the demo if you can. The system requirements are on par with Doom 3 as previously announced by Human Head. The minimum includes a 2GHz processor, 512MB RAM, and 64MB DirectX9.0c card. The full game will need 2.2GB HDD space. Recommended requirements mention a 2.5GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and a Radeon X800 or above. The game looks decent and gamers will remember Doom 3 in terms of the visuals. Back from the dead twice already, this game got third time lucky and now it’s finally ready to be published - 11 years after first being conceptualized. The jerky video is making me wonder whether I should get this game. Maybe I’ll get it for the X360 as and when I decide to buy one. Let’s see - this is one game I most certainly want to play. And you will too, once you check out the demo.