Prey

They are weak, bothersome, without brains. But you. You will be worse. Scan and slam, until it is done.
Too Long; Didn't Read: Prey is an immersive, slow paced, adventure game that not only creates tension through its horror-inspired enemies and its dark hallways, but also thanks to its morbid technologies and concepts.
It rewards exploration and attention to detail, and the world itself is probably one of the best and most realised in gaming. Its puzzlelike approach to combat may alienate some, but understanding it comes as part of the well-balanced progression.
I recommend Prey immensely, it earns its place as one of the best 0451 games out there, on the same level as Bioshock and System Shock 2.
The Gameplay
Combat: Prey does not play like a typical shooter. The game does not reward those who run and gun every environment, but instead those who take their time and methodically plan out their attack. This is why at first Prey can seem a little too hard with enemies eating away at you while you can only throw 3 swings of a wrench before you are out of breath.
The wrench can be swung 4 times at most before your character runs out of stamina. But charging your strike uses the same amount of stamina but does triple the amount of damage than normal. So, the correct tactic to use it would be to sneak up on an enemy with you ready to strike with the wrench. And this is just one example of how Prey has designed its combat around patience and tactic.
The Gloo Canon is another great example. When fired at an enemy it deals no damage, but it freezes them in place for a short period of time. This then allows you to charge up a wrench swing. This means before engaging in a fight it is a good idea to make sure you have or can immobilize them with this weapon. Since the Gloo Canon can create blobs that are physical, you can create access to higher ground, or create obstructions.
Exploration: Ammunition, health packs, etc, all of these items are exceedingly rare and crafting them requires a lot of recourses. This means even if you do not like exploring much in these games, it is in your interest. Exploration can be one of the most rewarding and useful things to do.
Sometimes a room or objective you need to reach will have a locked door that requires a key code, and you have not invested in the hacking skill. This means you must look around the room. Maybe above the door is a service hatch, that if you use the Gloo Canon to create a staircase to, will allow you access. Maybe entering a room, you ignored earlier will provide you with the code. If the door has a window next to it, you could smash it and if you see a computer, use the nerf gun rip off to open the door remotely. There are many ways to get around the station, and no area will truly be off limits, thanks to the ingenious level design.
Exploring outside the space station is also fantastic. It can be done very early on, and is used to access areas that were damaged, as well as reach far off points of interest like a floating billboard or a space shuttle drifting off in the distance. Access to the main locations of Prey can also be done from space but they are locked from the inside. This means space is more of a convenience to back track to areas you’ve already explored without having to go through the entire building.
The Player: Prey’s skill tree is body modifications, similar to Bioshock or Deus Ex. These can be used for combat, such as more damage with security weapons like shotguns and pistols, or more health. Some body mods help exploring the space station, such as more stamina to run, jump and hit with, or more strength to move obstructions out of the way. And some help improve your experience, like hacking to pacify robots or access locked off areas early, or repair to fix damaged electrical systems or ruined sentry guns.
One of the more interesting parts of this system however, is the ability to copy enemy abilities. Take the mimic for example, the basic enemy that hides itself as objects like coffee cups, health kits and office chairs. Bring one out of hiding, splatter it in glue to immobilize it, and you can scan it to understand it’s behaviour, but you can also unlock modifications to copy this ability, and then you can disguise yourself as objects as well. This works for all enemies, and certain allies, on the space station.
However, every time you unlock one of these alien abilities, you become more alien yourself. Only invest in alien powers, or have too many of them to counteract your human abilities, and soon the space station will perceive you as an alien threat, and then the security turrets and operators you considered allies will become hostile. This means not only do you have to think about which abilities you need more than others, but also how many you should unlock before you need to stop or counteract them, an odd game of balance.
The Story
Prey’s story is very complex and intricate, with lots to discover and many twists and turns. It is best experienced than told, but to give slight context you play as Morgan Yu, the sibling of Alex Yu who is in charge of Talos 1, the space station and research base you explore in Prey. It specialises primarily in producing Neuromods, which is human knowledge and experiences that you can inject into yourself to gain abilities. However when removed, these Neuromods reset your brain to the moment you installed them, meaning all the time you spent using them is forgotten. This is the explanation of how you have ended up on Talos 1, Neuromodless, confused, and now fighting for your life in an overrun space station.
Graphics & Soundtrack
This game is very beautiful, with plenty of jaw dropping spectacles and surreal locations. Floating around space is made so special by how vivid everything is, the tall and proud exterior of Talos 1, the floating bodies seemingly frozen in their last moments, the isolation you feel as you float alone, in between the Earth and the Moon.
The inside has a glamorous art deco theme for residential areas, and clean laboratories for workers. The closer you are to the top of this space station, the more natural areas you find like a garden, the crew quarters, and the kitchens. The bottom of the station is where the more dark and intimidating locations can be found, like the engine room, the central computing, the labs. This gives the station nice variety and makes areas you have explored distinct and memorable.
The synth wave soundtrack is brilliant, it really suits the games sci fi theme, as well as helps set the mood or raise the tension. The intense and fast tracks really helped make gun fights feel dramatic. But I found the best moments for the soundtrack was when it was slow and quiet, and I was slowly walking through a room I had just cleared, reading emails of these people who had died, picking up items, accompanied by a low synth tone.
Final Score & Comments
I would give Prey a 9/10. It so brilliantly balances RPG mechanics with action game design and exploration that has not been this satisfying since Bioshock 2. Its story remains mostly strong throughout the game, and never failed to make me question what I, or the major characters, had been doing, and if we were justified in our actions. It has good replay value, and plenty of side game content. I can’t see many reasons not to at least give this game a go.

What I expected: a relaxing shooter.
What I got: a mix of Half-Life, Bioshock, System Shock and Alien, on a space station decorated by Anton Sokolov.
I love making such mistakes.

underrated masterpiece.

Prey is a criminally underrated crossing of System Shock 2, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock and Alien: Isolation

Arkane is single-handedly carrying the immersive sim genre on their shoulders with Prey. One of the most underrated games of this gen.

Prey is.... Different.
It is an underrated game full of surprises who manages to stand out among all the other triple a titles.
I won't spoil much, just know that it's a game worth trying out.

Prey (2017) is a first-person science-fiction exploration-based action shooter game with RPG-elements developed by Arkane Studios for the CryEngine, and published by Bethesda Softworks. Taking place on an alternate history future's version of a joint American-Soviet-Chinese space station, player-character Morgan Yu will be forced to traverse the length of the entire installation in a desperate fight to survive and discover the many hidden truths of their current state of affairs, when an unexpected outbreak sends the station into a lonely chaos.
Taking heavy inspiration from the likes of System Shock 1 and 2, Deus Ex and the Bioshock franchise, Arkane boldy crafts a modern tribute to — and reinvention of — the classic "immersive sim" genre, which carries the style forward in its finest tradition, but struggles with shortcomings which are familiar to devoted fans of the aforementioned games. Across a single enormous, meticulously dense environment, Prey tests the player's wits and resolve in a series of emergent gauntlets based on a "systems-first" framework for experience generation. The mechanical "sandbox", as it were, starts off limited, choking the player's options to force them to improvise. As the game opens up, however, the game manages to continue to reward creativity and encourage ingenuity with its less restricted set of tools.
The best immersive sims give the player pressing reasons not to rely on a single strategy. Whether the enemy AI is too versatile, spread out and jumpy to allow for camping or all-out shootouts as it goes in Deus Ex, or fast weapon degradation and limited resources encourage planning out indirect routes and hiding, like they do in System Shock 2. Prey utilizes a broad, top level approach to this issue, with initially strong success. Combat in Prey is fast, slick and cerebral, while stealth is limited to the point of being almost non-viable on the harder difficulties. The weapon load-out on display offers a "Jack of all trades, master of none" composition which forces players to either rely on the mid-game Psychotronic abilities to survive — or to get creative. However, due to the abundance of upgrades to the player’s suit, weapons, and body/mind, by the finale of the game (as it is in so many immersive sims) the player will be so adept and powered up as to make previously hair-raising encounters completely trivial.
Replayability of Prey is high, but unfortunately so is backtracking. By the late game, the player will have visited the same key locations dozens if not hundreds of times in their efforts to fulfill sidequests, hunt for materials or progress the main story. However as these spaces are so intricate and open, chances are the player will uncover content and secrets tucked away upon nearly every sequential revisit, and due to the emergent approach to combat encounters, new formations of enemies will be waiting to surprise and challenge the player when they return. On the other hand, completing said side quests often results in just small corners of maps, or even lone chests, being unlocked, along with the potential for scarce exposition or character dialogue, so while Prey always gives the player something interesting to do even while backtracking — apart from the superficial craving for more resources weighing down on their mind — the game struggles to give compelling reasons to bother.
This speaks to how the generally open-ended approach of Prey's design comes at the cost of urgency. Rarely is any immediate pressure put on the player outside of the immediate minutia of individual combat encounters, and a few timed quests which are laughably generous with their time limits. While this freedom of exploration at the player's own pace makes the bulk of the game a rare delight, it results in a finale that, paired with the poorly scaling upgrade system, feels neither difficult nor urgent, in spite of the near-constant radio-messages from allies pressuring the player to speed up. While games often sacrifice difficulty in favor of a high pace for the narrative's climax, Prey's resolution is limp and tiring — both slow AND easy — and followed up by what must be an immersive sim tradition: a joyless, underwhelming end cutscene, so brief that it struggles to break even the 30 second mark.
The narrative itself weaves a backstory as dense and engrossing as the environments, asking big questions in quiet voices. While I found the conclusion disappointing on an initial playthrough, subsequent journeys through the same station evoke different, profound questions about the meaning of empathy and morality, the reliability of memory, the cost of progress, the toll of business and the ethics of engaging in both industries and simulations which, superficially, serve to enrich you. The construction of the story is more inspired than its presentation, which is often flat and under-directed in the face of Prey's real story: the suspenseful and tactile exploration of the gameworld itself.
Ultimately, Prey is a fresh and finely crafted powerhouse of replayability and intrigue. It's an experience which proves to be humorous, scary and exciting. It's as big as it is small in all the ways that count, piecing together a deconstructive tribute to the history of its subgenre and paving the way forward to a new world of brilliant, immersive game worlds.