8. July 2006

Prey demo

Story and dialogues

Its just another Doom 3/Quake 4 type of game, a little talk and a few unintelligent sentences and then you are in an alien and gross environment shooting. I'd love more technical mojo and good sentences.

Play System Shock 2 for good technical mojo (even for todays standards) and good voice-acting and intelligent dialogue and a very scary story that holds back and get better as you progress in the game.

Displaing the main character and having him speak can make you forget you are in the game.

Gameplay

and complex missions, or more strategic action like Half Life 2s physics: blow up a bridge and they fall down. Where is the concept of arena, then explore, then puzzle? Here its no arena just indoor architecture and corridors with random placed encounters. Check out Half Life 2 Antlion Guard and become a fillrate critic yourself.

"Walking-in-the-roof" and box-portals are very WOW at first but then not very depthy.

Weapons

The weapons are tame and not very interesting, their sound effects are plush and not as instant as i.e Quake 3 or Half Life 2 machine gun. With those we get more solid feeling. It's like how they engineer the sound and feel of the doors on a Ferrari.

Would be nice if the weapons had a story and explanation or he had to "learn" how to use them? A little more depth that is.

Monsters

The monsters are very fake when they get hit and die, and if you continue shoot them they won't blow up/dismember. When they are frozen they won't shatter. One should be able to shoot the brain-in-belly zomebies in the belly and it would shatter and you could give it critical hits there. It would add depth and gameplay, which is the most important factors in a fun game.

It's almost as bad as the monsters in Unreal 2.

If I wan't brainless and fun action let me have Doom 1&2, there we have huge arenas, lots of monsters, satesfying hits (pronounced and solid blood splatter, made possible because of the low resolution), satesfying death animations and weapons with personality and good sound FX. Quake 3 Arena also has good weapons and gameplay and the arcade feeling.

Just to rub it in I quote John Carmack: "I'd love to have 100 texture operations per pixel in a single clock." Weee that means tons of fancy texture effects and no focus on polygons and gameplay. Someone give John Carmack the bird.

Conclusion

Don't buy this game, it has no depth.