[Review] PREY xbox 360 game by elmer ruddenskjrik

[WilkerCSBD]

The Xbox 360 was the first console that I finally bought with my own money.

By the time I did, the console had been on sale for a few months,

but I waited until the summer of 2006 to buy it with the dazzling Prey,

the first game,

of all those that were promised for the Microsoft console,

which really had caught my attention in pictures in magazines.

In addition to the images, the plot of the game and the fact that the production was in charge of 3D Realms, they were for me a guarantee that I was going to enjoy it like few things, especially when a new console was released, which is another of the greats pleasures for someone who likes video games. A good part of my playing hours I have spent replaying my Duke Nukem 3D game over and over again for the first Playstation, so 3D Realms was a company with which I felt a special affinity, associating it with a work as exalted as that, and of which I will end up writing on another occasion ...

Prey, after a sober introduction with his name and the epic music of Jeremy Soule (the same composer of Oblivion and Skirym, to say the most famous), opens the shot from a subjective perspective in the dirty services of a roadside bar. This perspective will serve to describe the cinematics and for the development of the game itself, and with it we witness how one night in the mediocre life of a young Cherokee turns into a space epic with supernatural overtones.

As soon as the game begins, and after a quick tutorial in which they teach us to attack with a quick wrench-wrench fight against a couple of thugs, the whole place begins to dismantle as a result of a sudden alien abduction. During this kind of prologue, we are subjected to a chain of automatic meat loading for a gigantic alien ship that is the size of a small planet. While the protagonist we incarnate, his girlfriend and his grandfather are transferred, we can see different parts of the complicated and incomprehensible operation of different parts, such as catwalks with inverted gravity and the generation of portals through which the aliens appear and disappear, which are beings bestial and stooped that move with violent convulsions.

Once the protagonist frees himself from the chain thanks to the attack of a series of humans who have been resisting for generations within the same ship, our Indian protagonist begins his free walk through the infectious and biomechanical world of the planet ship.

Saying free is a way of speaking, as this game was still in the hallway breakthrough style, like most first-person shooter games of the time, and did not offer the certain freedom of exploration of the new Prey, released in 2017, and of which I have only tried the demo. Prey forces us to advance in the classic style, allowing us to discover the spiritual abilities of Tommy (which is what our protagonist is called), the growing arsenal of dazzling weapons that are actually living beings with strange abilities, and learn to move through spaces with altered gravity or through stage portals.

 
The graphics at that time were impressive, and any part of this long gameplay without comments, from which you can keep an eye on it, serves as a proof of this.

Technically still quite cool, and the design of all the elements continues to be one of the most peculiar and unique among science fiction and horror themed games, with alien monsters of all sizes and disgusting hybrids between humans and other things. product of negligent experiments.

Where the effort in the design stands out the most is in the appearance of the ship, which is dark, humid and claustrophobic in its periphery, in the first levels. Walking through them we can see that creatures that are little less than animals are crawling on all sides, and that the gates and other mechanisms of the facilities consist of disgusting folds of flesh very similar to human genital areas, which allow them to slip here and there. extraterrestrial soldiers, by some strange conduit transportation system, I have to assume.

As the game progresses, the spaces begin to open up and become more sophisticated, as if the places where the ship performs its most important functions are better cared for or need to be kept cleaner. In the same way, the combats end up becoming more complex, because while in the first levels it was enough to hide and look out to shoot, even if it was to machine-gun the beings that were shooting at us from an uncomfortable angle on a wall or from the ceiling, in the levels more advanced we already need to choose the right weapon to fight according to the distance while we do not stop moving, activate the elements that allow us to change gravity at will, or without ceasing to rush through the dizzying winding walkways that take us from the ground to a wall , and then to the ceiling.

In addition to using movement at different heights and along different planes of the scene (something that may not be so surprising today, but few games continue to use with such intelligence), the game's puzzles combined the activation of switches to open doors and of movement of parts of the scenes with the need to send the "spirit" of our protagonist to operate them.

 

And it is that, from a certain part of the beginning of the game, we discovered that, in times of tremendous need like the one that occurs in the game, a Cherokee like Tommy can use the power of his ancestral spirit to defeat his enemies. In addition to attacking, moving to this astral plane serves to cross some parts of the stage and access places that physically cannot, essentially when passing some walls and covering chasms between platforms. Combining this with the relative position of the physical body, portal teleportation, and continual changes in gravity, we have a fun and amazing salad of puzzles that play with physics and perspective, between battle and sometimes during battle.

In addition to this, there are some parts of the levels that are covered aboard capsules with which you fly through space between different ports on the planet. In these parts the game becomes a curious capsule simulator of those rounds from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", but with the ability to shoot to bombard the creatures on the stage or to fight against turrets and drones. flying mechanics. This implies flying through even huge scenarios through which we will then need to move on foot, which I hope will serve to give a rough idea of the ambitious scale of this game, despite its fairly linear development.

As if that were not enough, when the protagonist dies, the game, to distinguish itself from something more than any other, does not stop at all. We enter fully into a fun minigame in which Tommy's spirit must hunt down a kind of demonic parasites of the Cherokee spirit world with his bow. Once enough energy has been recovered, we can return to the real world to continue giving it a rod.

 
It is appreciated that a game in which it is easy to die from a sudden enemy ambush or from miscalculating a jump allows you to return to the fight without stopping to explain that you have died. And this is one of the highlights of this old jewel of the old Xbox 360 and PCs: the continuous fun. Advancing through the world that is the ship, fighting, stopping to discover all the details of the strange vitality of everything that surrounds us, or even trying to advance at full speed through the labyrinthine scenarios, all this is tremendously fun, and constantly one has the feeling of walking through a truly living environment and that you can be surprised with anything when you move on to the next room. Normally it will be something horrible and bloody, but you understand me ...

 
Of course, I think the old Prey from 2006 is far superior to the new one from 2017, which, in its demo for PS4, has only slightly intrigued me with the elements of its narrative, but has ended up boring me in terms of its playability. Perhaps it is that you need to go deeper to find the taste, but if its beginning is boring, the control and generic scenarios, and the action is not spectacular or, at least, challenging for one who plays, what is left?

Prey was once one of the best games on the Xbox 360, and it is surely arguably still one of the best first-person shooter and adventure games ever made. But there is no doubt that it is still one of the most distinctive, both for its style of play and the unique personality of its entire design.