Prey is what some people call an "immersive sim", I won't waste time defining what that means but I think it ranks about the same level as Bioshock in terms of interactivity, failing to equal the old classics in terms of complexity but being more accessible as a result which is probably what they wanted.
The locations where the player is meant to use a certain ability are marked with the same subtlety as a cracked wall in a Zelda dungeon, but there are often multiple ways to complete each objective and you can also do interesting things with the GLOO gun and certain abilities. Overall, for immersive sim fans Prey is pretty good.
There's a variety of neuromod abilities that the player can unlock, a staple of the genre ever since System Shock 2, and they are pretty useful for the most part. However, I think the only unique one is mimicry, all the others will be familiar to Bioshock players. I'm a little disappointed at the lack of futuristic weapons, but this makes sense in-universe because they mostly rely on turrets and the radiation beam is cool anyway.
That being said, the most noteworthy aspect about Prey for me is how inconsistent the experience is. At first it seems like it's going to be a horror game with difficult enemies that are preferable to avoid, and the game hints as such through tutorial pop-ups, but after a few upgrades nothing can really match the player anymore and resources are far too plentiful to ever be a major concern past the first few hours. By the end of the game there are a couple of "events" to mix up the gameplay and then the whole thing ends abruptly with a bunch of surface level philosophical "quandaries" that are about as black and white as Bioshock's.
Even more disappointing is the cast of NPCs that populates the station. Each one of them is one-dimensional, emotionally unstable and fills a diversity quota as if they were copy pasted from a spreadhseet. The only exceptions to this are the Morgan brothers who have actual goals, agency and personalities complex enough to allow for character development. You could say this wasn't the main focus of the game, but it's the only part that and the game relies far too much on radio calls to communicate goals to the player for me to ignore it. They wanted to make System Shock 2 and ended up with Borderlands almost.
To conclude, I think Prey is alright. It's not as memorable as Deus Ex or System Shock but those are big shoes to fill. They should have leaned on the mimics more instead of just making them trash mobs past the first 2 hours of the game.
The locations where the player is meant to use a certain ability are marked with the same subtlety as a cracked wall in a Zelda dungeon, but there are often multiple ways to complete each objective and you can also do interesting things with the GLOO gun and certain abilities. Overall, for immersive sim fans Prey is pretty good.
There's a variety of neuromod abilities that the player can unlock, a staple of the genre ever since System Shock 2, and they are pretty useful for the most part. However, I think the only unique one is mimicry, all the others will be familiar to Bioshock players. I'm a little disappointed at the lack of futuristic weapons, but this makes sense in-universe because they mostly rely on turrets and the radiation beam is cool anyway.
That being said, the most noteworthy aspect about Prey for me is how inconsistent the experience is. At first it seems like it's going to be a horror game with difficult enemies that are preferable to avoid, and the game hints as such through tutorial pop-ups, but after a few upgrades nothing can really match the player anymore and resources are far too plentiful to ever be a major concern past the first few hours. By the end of the game there are a couple of "events" to mix up the gameplay and then the whole thing ends abruptly with a bunch of surface level philosophical "quandaries" that are about as black and white as Bioshock's.
Even more disappointing is the cast of NPCs that populates the station. Each one of them is one-dimensional, emotionally unstable and fills a diversity quota as if they were copy pasted from a spreadhseet. The only exceptions to this are the Morgan brothers who have actual goals, agency and personalities complex enough to allow for character development. You could say this wasn't the main focus of the game, but it's the only part that and the game relies far too much on radio calls to communicate goals to the player for me to ignore it. They wanted to make System Shock 2 and ended up with Borderlands almost.
To conclude, I think Prey is alright. It's not as memorable as Deus Ex or System Shock but those are big shoes to fill. They should have leaned on the mimics more instead of just making them trash mobs past the first 2 hours of the game.