A sleeper for 2017, Prey is worth playing offering a strong single player plot-based story and solid game play in an interesting environment. You are placed in the role of Morgan Yu and find yourself aboard the space station Talos I, invaded by strange alien life forms and with the crew largely dead. As you explore the station, you'll find the usual array of side quests, puzzles and bits of story to help piece together what happened to the station and how you will prevent the alien threat from reaching Earth. A set of skill trees, both mundane and exotic, will help you build a character to sneak, shoot, repair, hack and perhaps take on bizarre new abilities.

Although it's not "new" at this point, the retro-futuristic 60s inspired decor is well done and consistent, blending LCD touch screens with rotary desk phones and chunky tape drives. Views from the outside of the station are suitably impressive, lending a sense of scale to the structure as you explore. Keeping with its suspense/horror theme, resources can be rare and you'll be scavenging odds and ends as you travel to place into handy Recyclers which can turn that junk into the raw building blocks (literally) to Fabricate into ammunition, medicine and other gear. This means spending some time on inventory management although I didn't find it overly onerous. At the default difficulty, alien threats were tough enough to take seriously but fairly easy to handle with some forethought and increasingly trivial once weapons and skills were upgraded.

Prey holds a self-contained story and environment to explore in a gaming scene largely full of "open world" wanderers. It's also almost all game with few cut scenes and no QTEs. It's a game style becoming increasingly hard to find and well worth playing.

A sleeper for 2017, Prey is worth playing offering a strong single player plot-based story and solid game play in an interesting environment. You are placed in the role of Morgan Yu and find yourself aboard the space station Talos I, invaded by strange alien life forms and with the crew largely dead. As you explore the station, you'll find the usual array of side quests, puzzles and bits of story to help piece together what happened to the station and how you will prevent the alien threat from reaching Earth. A set of skill trees, both mundane and exotic, will help you build a character to sneak, shoot, repair, hack and perhaps take on bizarre new abilities. Although it's not "new" at this point, the retro-futuristic 60s inspired decor is well done and consistent, blending LCD touch screens with rotary desk phones and chunky tape drives. Views from the outside of the station are suitably impressive, lending a sense of scale to the structure as you explore. Keeping with its suspense/horror theme, resources can be rare and you'll be scavenging odds and ends as you travel to place into handy Recyclers which can turn that junk into the raw building blocks (literally) to Fabricate into ammunition, medicine and other gear. This means spending some time on inventory management although I didn't find it overly onerous. At the default difficulty, alien threats were tough enough to take seriously but fairly easy to handle with some forethought and increasingly trivial once weapons and skills were upgraded. Prey holds a self-contained story and environment to explore in a gaming scene largely full of "open world" wanderers. It's also almost all game with few cut scenes and no QTEs. It's a game style becoming increasingly hard to find and well worth playing.