Arkane’s Prey reboot is a strange beast. It’s composed of the D.N.A. of a multitude of games, a Frankenstein's creation, given birth through the melding of the necrotic flesh of System Shock, Deus Ex, Dishonored and Dead Space, while maintaining next to no connection to the original 2006 Prey or its aborted sequel. Somewhere in there, it finds time to honour classic sci-fi movies such as Carpenter’s The Thing and Alien, with a sugary dash of classic Lovecraftian cosmic nihilism.

Prey is a Jack-of-all trades, trying to combine many gameplay styles and systems into one package. It’s all at once an atmospheric, story driven game, a first-person shooter, a stealth-em-up, a choice-driven R.P.G., a survival horror and a play-your-own-way kind of game. That’s a lot for any one game to handle but Prey tries its best to incorporate its disparate playstyles into one, cohesive gel.

Starting life as Morgan Yu, gender choosable, your daily life of repeated scientific trials is brought to a crash as you quickly discover that everything you know is a lie and that you’re not on Earth but rather on Talos-1, an impressive space station orbiting the Moon, and currently in the throes of a virulent and hostile alien infestation. It gets worse as you discover that your brother is, more than likely, the reason that you’re there and suffering from more than just a mild case of amnesia. Your mission then is to survive while trying to figure out what is actually going on.



After an incredible opening of stunning misdirection, Prey wastes no time in dumping you in the deep end. You’re barely through the concept of repeatedly running through the scientific trials everyday before a wrench is thrust into your hand and you’re tasked with escaping from your hamster wheel. Your first taste of the terror that the xenomorph threat, known as Typhon, represents, comes soon after and never stops.

Prey’s story is its greatest asset. It poses the feeling of trust no one and nothing, least of all yourself, and manages to maintain the sense of unreal dread throughout the campaign. Breaking out of your simulation cell is only the tip of the iceberg, with a lot more seemingly hiding beneath the surface.

Despite the corpses littering the hallways and the grim reminders of bloody, combat splattering the walls, Talos-1 feels like a believable, inhabited world and that you’re only just seconds away from a scene of peaceful cohabitation suddenly gone grim. Scattered around the station you’ll find audio logs, emails, notes and books all fleshing out the various characters that called Talos-1 home, along with the alternate history that brought this universe into being.

You’re never far away from a heartfelt message between two lovers separated in the chaos, a workplace spat gone cruel, or the results of an experiment that you feel you should know more about. Prey wants you to know who these people are, wants you to care about them and what’s befallen them, and that’s why the sense of distrust is so tangible, so painful, when you’re reading an email or a book that suddenly seems wrong when placed in context with everything that’s going on around you. Suffice to say, if you are paying attention to the narrative and all the seemingly filler material in the world, you’ll have worked out what’s going on fairly early. If not, then the ending comes as a well done surprise.



Prey is aesthetically pleasing as its stylised art deco design, very much Bioshock in space, keeps the game running at a great pace while giving you just enough visual fidelity and variety to enjoy the architecture. That said, eventually one machine room begins to look exactly like another once you’ve busted through the habitation areas, into the guts of the station and the machinery that keeps it ticking.

The game functions as a free-form, open world game ala Deus Ex, at least as open as you can get in the strict confines of a space station. The levels are broken down into different areas through which you can freely roam once you’ve progressed far enough into the campaign. Load times between areas can be fairly lengthy, however,, even long enough for me to check an email or three.

Nothing in the world is extraneous, even the panels lining the walls detailing this universe's history. Computers allow you to download maps of the area or open locked doors. All the items you pick up have a use. There’s the standard array of health and suit armour packs, along with ammo and food you can eat to replenish health and provide buffs. Junk can be recycled into useful material that you can use to synthesise more ammo, health, neuromods or weapons, once you’ve found the plans for them.

The game’s play-as-you-want design is tied to the R.P.G. system that defines your character’s skillset growth. Prey wants you to make choices. Which sidequests to do, who to save, how to approach combat, and which skills to unlock via neuromods. Prey’s skillset system isn’t overly diverse from anything we’ve seen in these sorts of games lately - there’s the usual item and health boosts, stealth or hacking abilities, and the more exotic Typhon abilities. Outside of the mimic ability, which lets you disguise yourself as a convenient piece of furniture, the rest of the skills fall into the predictable category of thermal blasts, psychic blasts and electricity-based powers.



Choices aren’t as dynamic as you would think however. Most of the time it comes down to something as simple as choosing to crawl through the conveniently located grate instead of either spending mods to unlock a hacking skill or searching the station for the requisite keycard. It’s a simple method of choosing to help, or not, and is both disappointing and freeing at the same time. Conversely though, those choices matter in the end. Here’s a hint: sit through the end credits to understand why your choices matter, be it something as simple as installing a Typhon-based neuromod to tracking down a murderer. It’s really important and helped elevate the impact of the story immensely.

The Typhon themselves don’t have a vast array of creature types to draw from. Mimics, those facehugger-style beasts prevalent in the trailers with their ability to turn into your favourite coffee cup, are most common. Phantoms are human-sized Typhon that later channel fire and electric attacks in your direction. There are more enemy types but they don’t test the limits of creative imagination. The one thing they all share is just how deadly they are. Make no mistake, Prey’s enemies are no pushover. Between being massive bullet sponges and moving as fast as The Flash in combat, they will wreck you. Repeatedly. Death at a Typhon’s tentacles is the norm rather than the exception because Prey wants you to die, and makes sure that you do.

Which brings us to the combat system and the reason you’re going to be dying so often. Prey, despite its different playstyles, is a first-person shooter and its mechanics are, quite frankly horrendous if I have to be honest. The game cripples your ability to deal with any of the Typhon threat, including mimics, with cumbersome and poorly designed combat. While you move perfectly through the world in general, as soon as you enter combat, regardless of which weapon you’re wielding, it’s like you’ve suddenly stepped into molasses. The simple act of moving in any direction becomes a ridiculous chore for no apparent reason. Couple that with the super speed enemies who constantly swoosh behind you, an infuriatingly slow turning speed, and a hit-and-miss collision system against bullet-sponge foes that can kill you with two attacks, you have a recipe for frustration of the highest order.

And that’s just dealing with one enemy. Wait until you have to deal with multiple phantoms and a mimic or two and you may as well just stand still and let them kill you because good luck trying to dodge any of their attacks, especially the psionically powered ones that have area-of-effect attacks.



Neuromods that increase your health become indispensable, while those increasing your overall speed and lightening the load of your weapons make a negligible difference. Planning becomes essential, but even that only goes so far. You can try to stealth your way through the map but it’s not an efficient system to use. Sure, you can do extra damage with a stealth attack but that doesn’t translate into much damage to the enemies overall. Once attacked , they’ll be all over you and your only saving grace is to hightail it from the first attack. That’s assuming you can turn fast enough to run in the other direction, which also assumes they haven’t just jumped behind you and you aren’t turning right into their ugly, gooey faces. Thankfully, mimics can be put down with one charged wrench swing, assuming you can hit the sprightly buggers or that your attack even registers. More than once, I found my wrench swings were completely ignored as the mimics and phantoms just stared at me as though they were waiting for me to throw a ball.

Enemy placement follows traditional rules. If you need something in an area, they’ll be there patrolling. Collect the keycard you need and suddenly a couple more will have been spawned in. As the infestation progresses through the game, you will have no choice but to fight or run. Late game saw me having to contend with multiple rogue military machines toting lasers and assault rifles, while still dealing with multiple phantoms and mimics. Sometimes that’s right when you step off a lift or jump through an area transition. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to put my controller down and walk away before I threw it at a wall. And I’m no FPS noob.

Making a game difficult is one thing, but making it difficult while providing a poorly designed set of tools to deal with it is another. Traditionally, survival horror is about disempowering the player, but this isn’t entirely a survival horror title, despite what the limited ammo and inventory space suggests. It’s certainly no good when it comes at the expense of player enjoyment. If I died because I didn’t have the chops to survive that would be acceptable. But to die because the combat mechanics are clunky and stiff and just unusable. . . well that’s just damn infuriating.

It doesn’t stop there as Prey’s arsenal is mostly useless. The GLOO gun will become the most useful weapon you have because it can temporarily freeze most enemies long enough for you to get in a couple of blows, while also helping you out with environmental puzzles (where it shines as a makeshift stair creator). The wrench will be your second most used weapon and the shotgun your third. The pistol does very little damage so it’s only use is to slowly whittle away enemy health from a distance, while the Q-Beam is the most useless laser I’ve used in some time. Which also brings to mind the enemy design. Most of them you want to fight from a distance, but the weapons which are most useful require you to get in close.




Eventually I chose to ditch any sort of strategy for pure aggression, using the shotgun and Combat Focus skill, which slows time and provides an attack buff. It got the job done but not without costing me a large chunk of health, armour and valuable resources. I spent most of the late game running through areas and avoiding as much combat as possible. It became simply unfeasible to fight since I was tired of all the constant reloading by that point.

Prey’s campaign is easily 30+ hours long. And that’s not counting the extra time that the sidequests can add on. There are also multiple endings to the game with some room for choice in them as well.
By now you may be wondering whether or not my hatred for the combat system justifies the score I’m giving, especially when I’m so entranced by the story and what those choices, as limited as they can be, have strived to do. You see as much as those things are great, as much as I enjoyed the games’ final denouement and the world building, by the time I’d reached my 22nd hour of playtime – with another 10 more to go – I just didn’t care anymore.

I didn’t care that I hadn’t taken revenge for a loved one’s murder. I didn’t care about the numerous, still living staff of Talos-1 that I could rescue. I didn’t care about the ones I had rescued and still needed to help. I don’t care about the sidequests I’d left unfinished. I don’t even care that I have a save setup just before one of the other endings, which would only take about 30 minutes of work to get. The very thought of having to fight another Typhon, even a lowly mimic, just fills me with rage. When I got my first ending and chose the choice that was relevant to me at that point, I didn’t even wait to hear the further possible options voiced out. And that’s completely, utterly sad as the game clearly has the capacity for multiple playthroughs

Prey could have been something really amazing with more work and a little bit more of a streamlined focus. Unfortunately, from a playing perspective, it’s just average.

Prey was tested on a PS4 with the Day One patch installed. It has been noted that the technical issues on the PS4 are relatively widespread. We plan to test out a different version of the game to see if there are any differences and will update the review if required.