Is this game good? Sort of in the mood for a System Shock 2 clone.
Someone kindly direct me to the impressions of a prestigious Codex personality who properly appreciates SS2.
Screw it, I have the
tag, I'm about as obsessed with the design of SS2 as I am with that of DX, and I have a lot to say on Prey (uhhh expect more later).
Overall it's definitely worth playing if you know what you're getting into. A lot of the systems are ripped straight from SS2, and this is a good thing even though some of the designs miss the mark. There is also a good amount of genuine innovation, too, it just never reaches its potential and some of it seems only half-finished. But it's worth seeing some of the new directions Arkane wanted to take a spiritual Shock successor in, and it's a far far sight better than Bioshock in this regard.
I originally had a much more
negative impression of the game when I first completed it just over a year ago. I chalk a lot of this up to two facts: a lot of the game's more hardcore features had been clearly cut prior to release, and I insisted on playing it on Nightmare difficulty to make up for it. It turns out this was a mistake, as Prey's difficulty settings are just
lazy damage modifiers that don't really serve to make the game more challenging. Moreover, the swiftness of death on higher difficulties (often from poorly communicated and thus seemingly cheap attacks) will encourage you to save liberally to avoid the more tedious gameplay on offer, namely the obsessive looting of trash you'll be doing throughout the game.
When the game was updated in June with some of the hardcore features (weapon degradation, traumas, limited oxygen in space) re-enabled in the Survival Mode options, I replayed it with a more positive outlook and found I liked the game quite a lot better in my second run. Importantly, I
turned the difficulty down to Normal and imposed a strict no-quicksave rule on my playthrough. It turns out this was both more tense and challenging, and you'll start to actually care about that stack of resources you've been hoarding and might even need to start crafting medkits, ammo, psi hypos, and in my case, weapons. See, the Survival Mode options are nice, and I was
initially quite happy with them, but Arkane sadly shit the bed in terms of balancing them. Weapon degradation adds a great amount of depth to character building
unless you actually spec into Repair 1, which for its pitiful cost of one Neuromod is stupidly effective at keeping your weapons in order. The traumas are a great addition to gameplay, but your mileage may vary on how many of each kind of trauma-clearing item you find and whether it's better to just abuse the heal bots. Limited oxygen in space sounds fantastic, except it only kicks in at low suit repair, which you should
never experience at any point thanks to the insane overabundance of Suit Repair Kits (for anyone curious, every medical cabinet alone has a 1/3 chance to have one of these in EACH of its slots). If I can find the time soon, I might whip up a very modest balance patch to address some of the more glaring issues, since it is just a matter of unpacking some configuration files and tweaking some default values.
There are also some rather boring levels (you may feel the urge to quit at the Crew Quarters, *yawn*), the last stretch of the game is more dull and drawn-out than "overly intense" as some game journos have accused, and the story is sadly a snoozefest outside of some intrigue at the beginning, which actually kinda matters for this kind of game where the gameplay and fiction feed into one another. As late as April of this year, these aspects along with my original complaints might have caused me to
recommend against the game, unless you just need more Immersive Sim in your life. But now, I'm at least tepid and possibly eager in recommending Prey to any fans of this sort of game, especially SS2. Just make sure you enable the Survival Mode options and rely entirely on the autosave (it's actually pretty lenient). Oh, and do yourself a favor and play the DLC, in some ways it's a more impressive, hardcore, and complete work than the base game.
