Prey 2017

Prey is not a straightforward shooter, and if you come in expecting one, it will punish you for it. This is Arkane's spiritual follow-up to System Shock: a first-person immersive sim where the guns (pistol, shotgun, boltcaster, Gloo Cannon) are almost secondary to the systems wrapped around them. You play as Morgan Yu, a researcher aboard the Talos I orbital station in an alternate-history 2032, and on day one everything goes sideways when the Typhon alien experiment escapes containment. What follows is 20-plus hours of creeping through a genuinely believable space station, looting every drawer, recycling junk at Fabricator terminals to craft ammo and med kits, and deciding how much alien DNA you want pumping through your veins. The core loop runs on Neuromods, Prey's upgrade currency. You can stay purely human: invest in hacking, heavy lifting, wrench damage, firearms proficiency. Or you crack open the Typhon skill tree, scan aliens with the Psychoscope, and start absorbing their powers. Mimic Matter lets you shapeshfit into a coffee mug or a trash can to squeeze through locked vents. Kinetic Blast, Electrostatic Burst, and others give you psychic tools that combine messily and satisfyingly with environmental hazards like oil spills and explosive canisters. The catch: stack too many Typhon upgrades and the station's automated turrets start treating you like the enemy. It is a consequence system that actually bites. As a shooter specialist, here is my honest read on the gunplay: it is the weakest part of the package. The early hours especially drag because your weapon options are thin and the basic Mimic enemies, fast-moving phase-shifting blobs that can disguise as any object in the room, are genuinely irritating to track and kill. Feedback on hits is soft, ammo is scarce by design, and TTK against bigger Typhon variants like Phantoms and Telepaths is high enough to feel sluggish before your build comes online. If raw gunfeel is your metric, Prey will frustrate you. But if you treat combat as one of several tools rather than the main event, using the Gloo Cannon to freeze a Phantom solid before unloading a shotgun shell, or luring a Nightmare into a room and locking it in, the systems start clicking. The Gloo Cannon alone is one of the better utility weapons in recent memory: it stuns, creates climbable platforms, and seals explosive vents. Talos I itself is the star. The station is a Metroidvania-style interconnected map with believable architecture, from the art-deco corporate lobby to the zero-g exterior sections you can use as fast travel shortcuts between zones. Environmental storytelling through audio logs, emails, and scattered personal items builds a picture of the people who lived here before the outbreak. The PC version runs on CryEngine and, past the early save-corruption bug that Arkane patched within a week of launch, holds up technically well even on modest hardware. No ranked ladder, no netcode to stress about, no live-service hooks. It is a single-player game that respects your time by being dense rather than long for its own sake. The criticism that sticks is fair: Prey caters to so many playstyles simultaneously that no single one feels as tuned as it would in a more focused game. The stealth is bare-bones, the shooting is merely serviceable, and some alien powers skew overpowered in ways that deflate tension. The story sets up interesting paranoia but the ending lands lukewarm regardless of your choices. If you need a tightly balanced combat loop, look elsewhere. If you want a game that rewards curiosity, improvisation, and a willingness to experiment with every weird system the devs threw at the wall, Prey holds up as one of the more underappreciated PC releases of its generation.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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