Arkane PREY - Arkane's immersive coffee cup transformation sim - now with Mooncrash roguelike mode DLC

Big surprise the game is shit.

The enemies are just boring black squiggles that look like they came from a retarded child's coloring book.

 

at 1:36 those facial animations rival Andromeda.

 

It's pretty cool how all personnel living and dead aboard the space station can be located through certain computer terminals. I read an email from some guy who was bitching about a neuromod shipment coming up short so I looked him up on one of those terminals and it lead me to his corpse. Found a bunch of good shit.

 

How many of you fags bought it? I know many of you just love showering bethesda with money and then whining about how gaming is shit.

 

Okay, couldn't resist and gave some hard earned money to Bethesda jews. I've been playing this for a few hours, my overall impression is positive while I have a few criticisms of things that really annoyed me.

First the positives, the game has awesome level design. You can go crazy exploring each nook and crany on this game, there is alot of verticalitty and many rooms have multiple levels arranged on complex way and many times really good stuff is hidden on not so obvious places.

The second positive is that the upgrade tree is more akin to something like Deus Ex Human revolution, it isn't a tacked on upgrade system like on many modern games but it isn't anything close to what System Shock 2 or Deus Ex or even Bloodlines offered. It is a middle of the road system between popamole decline and true incline. There are turrets to hack, there are doors to repair, there are heavy crates to lift, the basic stuff you saw on Human Revolution. It is certainly better than Bioshock 1.

The third positive is that the game isn't as easy as I feared, of course this could change later with the more overpowered powers but so far, phantoms and mimics can beat your ass on hard if you aren't careful. They teleport around including to behind you and phantoms can two shot youwith their projectiles if you are too slow to move. The GLOO gun isn't as effective against bigger Typhoon enemies.

My main criticism is that while the ammo is scarce, this is just an illusion, you can recycle that abundant trash you find around into ammo so there is actually alot of ammo around and you don't need to manage resources so hard like you had to on System Shock. I'm already at the point that I'm feeling confortable spending shotgun ammo on mimics.

My second criticism is that Talos 1 while really well done in terms of verticality, options for traversal and exploration it is a little barebones so far in terms of ambient storytelling. One of the things I loved so much on System Shock 1 was that by the end of the medical bay, you had access to the recent backstory of the recent dead on that place and the horrors they suffered. It was great to create the feeling of a backstory that you could emphatize with, the storytelling on Talos 1 is just "OMG, evil corporation did experiements with smoke aliens, this couldn't end well, wink, wink."

Of course this could improve later as I'm only at the beginning but I miss an strong character, a villian like Shodan or even Andrew Ryan someone to give a face to the place. The Citadel and Rapture were made in the image of beings that thought themselves as gods and that brought a really cool personality to the whole place. I don't know if "generic" is the right word, but I feel detached from what is happening at Talos 1. So far, even Mankind Divided with its akward social commentary was better at ambient storytelling than Prey.

Again, things could improve, we will see.

The final criticism is that the game isn't scary and the atmosphere is kinda meh, there was something unsettling and creepy with the enemies on System Shock 2 and something like Dead Space. Both the Citadel Station and the ship on System Shock 2 felt claustrophobic and really cold. The feeling of creepiness with the cold metal hallways and body horror, specially on System Shock 2 isn't here. There is no body horror like on System Shock 2, no psychological horror like on Silent Hill. The Typhoon are threatening as enemies but they are just faceless black ooze smoke monsters, there isn't much of a personality to them. The huge open arenas with the colourful ambient don't make for good horror game material.

I will play and invest 100% on the alien powers to see how the game reacts to this and meet mister Nightmare.

 

I just finished it, took me around 20 hours. The fun kind of dies off in the latter part since you're forced to do a lot of backtracking and a ton of enemies start showing up, but by that point I had plenty of ammo if I wanted to fight them. However I had all the mobility upgrades so I usually just sprinted past.

 

Yeah absolutely overwhelming amounts of backtracking isn't incline, and certainly in the lategame you are going to be trekking all over the station repeatedly visiting crew quarters for umpteenth minor quests in a very System Shock esque vibe. It certainly hits the vibes of the old metroidvania games, although thankfully there are far fewer loading screens because modern gen and modern tech to make the backtracking tolerable.

 

It's nice to see an Arkane game where you can't be an overpowered god for once

 

So it's 20 hours? Thought this will be a max 10 hour game.

 

Finished it. Took me around 24 hours. I went for the most difficult/empathetic/non-lethal choices, and I'm exhausted as hell. It's the kind of game that won't let you stop due to the constant backtracking and new optional missions popping up everywhere, which entails more backtracking in a sprawling Talos I full of alien respawns. It's been really intense and very satisfying.

Dat ending tho. Something's telling me they haven't planned for a sequel...

 

Yeah I agree I could never warm up with the characters myself, with the exception of Alex. That didn't change either later in the game despite doing a lot of favors for them, returning to them personally and squeezing every response out of them. They just didn't really click with me. Reading E-mails was probably more fun. This is puzzling given Chris Avellone helped writing some of the main characters. The strong point of the game here really is the gameplay and exploration, with the narrative taking a backseat.

 

So is it just me, or has this game failed to generate any hype in a large gaming community? It looks like it isn't selling that well either.

After Dishonored 2 early sales flop, it seems there might be a problem with Bethesda marketing strategy.

 

Oh wait, forgot Denuvo. Will wait until they'll remove it.

 

As far as I can tell this game's PR was shoved into every nook, cranny and orifice of the ol' interweb computing network. Even some of my favourite streamers and youtubers who rarely play games like this and never sponsored content suddenly popped out playing this as a PR gig.

My guess is the problem really is with Arcane. Since Dishonored 1 I had a strong, persistent feeling this studio is being incredibly overhyped. The game was solid average at best and yet it was being paraded around as the good old Citizen Kane of vidya. It's just like Irrational, same story.

 

So, I tried out the PS4 demo, and perhaps I'm missing something crucial (I imagine someone will point to the PS4 part of the sentence), but somehow the close-range combat - which there is quite a bit of - seems strictly devoid of fun. Now there is no such thing as really good real-time first-person melee combat to begin with, but it could still strive to be inoffensively bad - but here, it's just hard not to feel ridiculous flailing about awkwardly at tiny aliens running and leaping all about the place faster than you can turn, while the fact that you pretty much have to look down to hit anything makes it really hard to see what else is happening around you. What's more, it takes a while to get any ranged weapon that actually does any damage, so unless you just run past everything - which, it seems to me, kind of undermines the exploration angle - you're going to spend a fair amount of time whacking the nasty black headcrabs no matter what while the loud, unpleasant combat noise plays. Perhaps I am just so old and decrepit that my withered appendages can no longer manage the simplest of hand-eye coordination tasks, but I am having a difficult time conceiving why exactly it's a good idea for a game to spend this much time having the player doing something that is only tolerable at best.

 

Citation needed

 

I will happily accept the stinging rebuke of Daniel Vávra's facepalm once he has released a game with melee combat that surpasses Dark Souls. Until then, I concede that my statement was just an opinion framed as a declaration of universal truth, but I see no reason to change said opinion, namely that third-person melee combat is, on the whole, better than first-person melee.

 

Yup, this game seems to have fixed one of most common complaints people have against SS2.

 

I caught a look at the very first moments of this game (30 mins) and I'm confused. I get the System Shock 2-vibe from seeing all those "skill x required"-notifcations everywhere, but what really gets me are all the readables, and the Thief (FM) feelings I get from those that refuses to go away... maybe because there's so much damn reading going on.

Sneaking the credits into the skyline during the helicopter ride was a very clever idea (except for Arkane Studios plastering their name on the bridge) and the game engine seems to be capable of some clever things, but beyond that I'm not seeing anything here that justifies breaking either the "Never spend more than $20 on a video game"-rule or the "Don't touch it because it's a Bethedsa title"-commandment.

And that response from the dev about not having a PC demo because of how Steam works is just a fart into people's faces. Douchebags like that don't deserve having a job.

 

Raphael was just trying to make a more or less proper excuse for the shitty Zenithardesta decisions.
He and Harvey looked very bright and inspired before and after the release of Dishonored.
Now they both look like they were enslaved by a sexual maniac, and put in a state of constant rape and abuse for years.
And it's kinda true story. Vault Boy knows.

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I know all the Bethesda horror stories, especially the Arkane one.

What I don't get is how come they didn't all just jump ship once they realized they'd been screwed jewed over and start fresh somewhere else.

 

Because being independent is hard.
And if a small and independent studio becomes more or less big and delicious, it get swallowed by a bigger fish. Basically, the same thing all over again.
MachinesGames escaped from Starbreeze and EA, but a few years later were bought by Zenimax anyway.

 

Why should they even release a demo to begin with? Who else is releasing demos for AAA games these days?

 

He is wrong in every single thing he said.
Especially about enemies being hard later on,i am watching a streamer plowing trough late game enemies with maxed out weapons and he has at least 50 of each health restoring items.
And there are no limited supplies in the game whatsoever.
With recycling and crafting you can get everything you need in not so small quantities.
Also complaining about vague quest information is laughable,you get told where you need to go and that is all you need.
He also complains about difficulty in his other fps games review's.
If it isn't piss easy he will say it is too hard.
Maybe he should play the batman combat games,those are perfect for no skill's gamers.
I personally prefer dwtermnator to him in terms of causal game reviewers.

If you really want to complain about something then you can complain about the backtracking and the lukewarm characters and story.
But that is Arkane trademark by now.
Also bonus points for not having irons sights.