I think that starting Half-Life while playing this game only hightened it's flaws. I can see a lot of Valve's design elements at use here but in a much slower and more sluggish to control game. Maybe it's just me but the player character in this game is just much too slow for it to be as fun as other fps sci fi horror games. (This may also be attributed to playing on controller which I am finding for most shooters is the inferior way to play them)
The story is also a nothingburger, skip this and play Half Life or Alien Isolation.
The story is also a nothingburger, skip this and play Half Life or Alien Isolation.
WildPotato
1 year ago
While I agree with some of your points, Half-Life is not the best comparison piece for this game because Prey really isn't trying to be like it at all. It's not really a shooter, but an immersive sim that directly takes nods from the sub-genre's godfathers like the System Shock games, the first of which came out in 1994. A lot of the more "immersive" or realistic aspects of the game design here isn't Arkane crimping Valve's style in a slower way, that's just how immersive sims are. The emphasis is less on the shoot-bang but more on puzzle solving through emergent gameplay. You might not vibe with that, which is cool, but Prey and Half-Life are from completely different schools of first person game design, so the comparison isn't really apt.