I want to say first off that I don’t think Prey was a bad game. Some of what I’ll say will sound a bit negative but overall it is a solid game. It is like a space version of Bioshock and Dishonored but it has worse combat than either of those. It has many things it did well but I didn’t enjoy the combat much. I found there to be too few weapons to use for my liking. There is a shotgun; pistol and a wrench as your main weapons. There are some grenade type weapons you can use that have different properties and there are powers you can choose to learn. Overall though I wasn’t interested in the alien powers and found the environmental attacks such as throwing furniture at enemies cute but not something that I wanted to do often. I also didn’t like the zero gravity parts as I found moving around annoying as I kept flying past where I wanted to go. There were also some timed missions which is a game feature I despise. Another game idea I hate that was used was respawning enemies. After killing all enemies in an area I could return later and there were new ones there. Now they weren’t the same ones, it was trying to say that the aliens were moving about the ship and nowhere was safe but the timing was way off. I could leave an area and return seconds later and there would be new enemies. You may say the game doesn’t follow real time but the timed missions were indeed using real time so I maintain it was poorly done. Many objectives were also very vague about where to go or what to do. Others were very specific or easy to figure out so it was a toss up on whether I would enjoy the mission. Lastly I was hoping that there would be some explanation about just what the Nightmare Typhon was but it never came. This thing stalks you across the station and even if you kill the thing it will come back later and hunt you more. I thought that maybe it would play a bigger role than just annoying me but I was wrong.
Now let me state what the game did well. The story was great and the further it got in the more I enjoyed it. I loved finding audio logs; emails; notes; etc that helped fill in the gaps on just what happened on Talos I. The voice acting was well done across the board. The trauma effects were fantastic. If you choose to turn it on there are trauma effects that can happen to your body based on certain injuries. You can become concussed; get radiation sickness; break bones; hemorrhage blood; etc. They were very well done in terms of the little details. When I was concussed everything became blurry at times and light was disorientating. When bones would break from a fall you could hear the bones crunch while walking and you limped. When you were hemorrhaging blood you left bloody footprints. The inventory system was well done and reminded me of Deus Ex. The system of being able to recycle items to build other items was well used. The graphics overall were pretty good. Facial detail and fire detail were a bit poor but the colour use was good as was the detail on weapons and objects.
I played Prey on Linux using Wine and Lutris. The game did have some technical issues. It crashed to desktop while loading a game once. It also froze once during the end credits and once during game play. Overall the performance was good. It did get laggy for a literal second or two sometimes but it wasn’t frequent and it never lasted longer than a couple seconds. The frame rate was usually over 80 FPS. There are 5 graphics options; 4 AA options; 4 AF options; and an FOV slider that went from 60-120. Alt-Tab worked. You can manually save whenever you want aside from when on elevators. There are 20 save slots although with the auto saves the game does at points there can be more. I played version 10966486 (38551) from GOG. You can change the difficulty settings at any time.
Game Engine: Cryengine
Disk Space Used: 27.5 GB
GPU Usage: 0-99 %
VRAM Usage: 3255-4178 MB
CPU Usage: 14-41 %
RAM Usage: 3.0-4.4 GB
Frame Rate: 27-144 FPS
Settings used: Highest; SMAA2x; 16xAF; adaptive resolution off
So in the end did I have fun ? I did. I didn’t enjoy all of the game but I enjoyed enough of it to finish it. The good outweighs the bad. I finished Prey in 26 hours 47 minutes. I paid $14.99 CAD for it and would place it’s value closer to the $20 range. If you’re looking for a pure shooter it won’t fit the bill but if you’re more into adventure than pure action than it has enough to offer.
My Score: 7/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Linux Mint 20 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.8.0-25-generic | Wine 5.21 | DXVK 1.7.2 | ACO Compiler | Feral Game Mode