Xbox 360 Underrated Gem: Prey
36his is a series of gameplay vids I'm doing highlighting overlooked games for the various consoles I own.
Prey is perhaps the most painfully underrated first person shooters on the Xbox 360.
According to wiki, Prey has been in development in one form or another since 1995. I can vouch for personally seeing a preview of the game in a 1998 issue of GamePro magazine. Either way, it was in development for a very long time.
From a gameplay standpoint, Prey has the oldschool FPS feel. Think more Half-Life and Doom 3 than Halo. It's just you the lone guy alone in a giant space ship filled with a plethora of hellacious baddies, and some really trippy level design that uses portal technology made famous by Portal.
It also has the standard gun types, but with an alien spin to them. They are fun to use, but aside form the weird designs to them, they don't really stand out. It's not that the guns suck, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but it's a shame that the cool looking guns just replace the standard guns.
From a design standpoint, it's a really well designed, and lengthy FPS game. Some people complained that the game was too short, but I remember it feeling extremely long. It's been a while since I played all the way through it, so I may be mistaken, but it certainly feels like it took a good long while for me to complete.
Prey is also story driven, so it's not just a straight up FPS. You play as a Cherokee named Tommy who who is on a quest to save his girlfriend after being abducted by an alien ship.
A big complaint that people had with the game is that once you gain the ability to spirit walk, the game becomes to easy. Instead of reloading your game when you die, you are instead transported to a spirit realm where you play in essence a mini game in order to get your life back, and you come back right where you left. However, what's the difference between not dying at all, and just quickly reloading your previous save? I could be argued that games that allow you to save anywhere have the same effect.
Two other complaints I have about the game are the long load times, and the laggy online play. The multiplayer has that fast and furious Quake deathmatch feel to it, but ever game I've ever played online in this game (I no longer have a gold account though), was painfully laggy at times. It's a shame, because I enjoy that Quake style of online play.
Prey is also available on the PC.