DaRmaZat It must have been since rage quiting Alien Isolation that I so much hated a game which looked fine at a first glance. But as soon as I started looking more deeply into Prey, it became really clear that a lot of aspects in the game were done so horribly wrong.
A first core problem of the game is that it does not know what it wants to be. A logical consequence of this is that the gameplay contains a mix of everything: puzzle, stealth, combat, …, I guess it was all at a large discount during the development phase. No, serious now, normally this should be fine, if it were not the case that all these mechanics suffer from the same disease: The Great Unbalance.
Prey’s puzzles are very repetitive. Too often I got stuck in the game while plain old climbing and platforming was the solution. Also, you must search those stupid key cards time and time again, forced to listen to overly boring audio logs, while non-stop-respawning danger is lurking behind every corner.
Stealth does not work, as the enemies clearly can see through walls . On top of that, nearly all weapons are ineffective against them, and as mentioned, the aliens constantly respawn. Most of the time I just choose to stick with my wrench, because that gave me at least the satisfactory idea that I could punch something to death.
The game’s objectives do tell you where you have to be, but not how you can get there, nor which skills or play style will be needed once arrived there. While it looks like an interesting idea to have that kind of freedom, the way it is implemented, is so very, very bad. You will loose a lot of time because of constantly getting lost in how to navigate through the environment, that you will be forced to start playing how the game wants you to play. And that is not how it should be. Instead of really enjoying the vastness of possibilities, the latter will turn out to be a not even half-empty box.
The too cascading skill upgrade system is totally flawed. To defeat basic enemies, you need powers which you might never possess at the finale stage, especially if you decided to upgrade the wrong stuff. Next to that, the crafting system with the Recycler-Fabricator combo is just plain dull. There’s too much useless loot to grab, a lot of these are just fillers.
The amount of backtracking is insane. You will be revisiting older locations far more than you ever will have visited your granny.
The story falls flat. Really, really flat. Originality is zero, and no character, no event is memorable. It all just passes by without any immersive moment at all. One week after completing the game, I can hardly even remember what the story was about, I think some aliens invaded a space station?
Once you arrive in the final chapters of the game, you will just be running until it’s over. Unbelievable, never thought to have to say this, but this was really, really worse than Fallout 4… So nope, no additional footage of this Prey-whatever-game will ever, ever be uploaded here again.
