Tommy wants to leave the reservation and take his reluctant girlfriend Jen with him… and his wish comes true in a bizarre way that carries him to places he never imagined. Prey is a first person shooter that explores old and new territory for the genre, introduces some new concepts without feeling gimmicky and never loses its focus on intense action and fire fights. It's a gruesome game that is very much for adults, but if you're a shooter fan then this is one of the most enjoyable and innovative games to come along in quite a while.

Prey is story driven and filled with exploration and interesting puzzles, yet it's linear and structured enough that you'll never get lost for long. The story centres around Tommy as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend and grandfather, after they are taken from a bar on the reservation, and on his journey of spiritual awakening as he battles to conquer the invasive alien force. Most of the story is clichéd and predictable, but it has enough twists to keep things interesting throughout.

There are three unusual features that set it apart from the crowd - spirit walking, which lets your spirit go where your body can't, death walking, which is a mini-game where you battle the shamed spirits of ancestors to return to the mortal plane, and wall walking on powered areas that blows away the norms of up and down in the game. The gameplay integrates these features with the more traditional elements of the game in ways that are really innovative, yet feel completely natural. For example, right after you activate your first wall-walk panel, you come to a break in the path - while upside down. If you attempt to jump across the gap you land quickly in the 'death walk' mini-game, as leaving contact with the panel causes you to fall downwards. Then you discover a moving platform that will cross the gap, but which needs to be triggered to move. So, you walk onto this platform, then spirit walk back to where the switch is located (and see your body upside-down). Press the button to move the platform and you can rejoin your corporeal form on the other side! Since the game is full of puzzles, it's not surprising that you frequently need to use one of these features to solve them. One of my favourites finds you inside a cube with several gravity-inversion panels on the walls. You can play with these and see how you need to orient the cube … but how will you get out? I'll leave the rest a surprise, because it is worth discovering for yourself.

None of these feel out of place and soon enough you looking for enemies on the ceiling hanging upside down aiming at you like it was second nature. Every aspect of the gameplay is solid and works very well - there is the usual variety of weapons, but each has been twisted to suit the alien environment, making them feel familiar yet fresh. Enemies are also variations on the types you've fought for years in shooters, yet each one takes massive damage from some weapons and little from others, making you adapt your strategy constantly.

Fuelled by tremendous visual design and powered by the Doom 3 graphics engine, Prey looks great and performs well on reasonable hardware. A sense of scale and size is captured throughout the game that many thought was beyond the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine, and it does so with ease. You will often look around in awe at the massive, detailed designs, before returning to the action, gripped by the flow of the soundtrack and sound effects. The music is always appropriate and it enhances the mood perfectly, as does the solid voice acting. The controls are standard FPS fare and work pretty well.

Even by the measure of adult-targeted FPS games, Prey is a brutal shooter that is filled with some of the most disturbing imagines of any game in recent memory. Some of the things that disturbed me the most involved children; given the brutality you have witnessed early on in the game, the first sighting of kids in the alien structure causes Tommy to say, "Oh, this can't be good" … and my thoughts echoed that sentiment. A couple of hours in, you come upon a horrific scene of the disembodied spirits of children coming to viscously attack living children that have also been abducted. Later you must face these same spirit children in combat, on more than one occasion. It is all very sad and reinforces the brutality of the enemy you are facing.

Living up to every element that earned the adult-oriented ratings worldwide, Prey is full of strong language and has some partial nudity. The language comes mainly from the protagonist, who has a tendency to hurl profanities at his enemies and in response to some of the unbelievable situations he encounters. The partial nudity comes in the form of a major enemy you meet late in the game, but certainly couldn't be described as sexual. More disturbing pseudo-sexual imagery comes from much of the enemy area you are trapped in functioning like a body; you see pods coming through a fleshy tube by a peristaltic process, and there are visible parts that function as veins, arteries and sphincters. Perhaps the strangest image is one of spider-monsters coming through what clearly appears to be female genitalia. Since most other parts seem to match form to function, this seems out of place and perhaps a bit gratuitous. However, these occasional images are not so shocking that they should really be the deciding factor on the appropriateness of a game clearly already aimed at adults.

Prey seems to be respectful of Native American culture and traditions. While the characters might be seen as stereotypes, they are all portrayed in a positive light, as people of great strength and resolve. Some may question placing the 'sacred land' in an area that looks like the desert southwest, but it was clearly shown to be a place of great power and importance. The developers seemed to take pains to balance the quickly identifiable items and characters needed for the plot-lite nature of a shooter with actions and imagery that indicate respect for those items and traditions. For example, while Tommy is the protagonist, his disrespect of the Cherokee traditions meets with chiding from his strong, grounded girlfriend and traditionalist grandfather. This is certainly not aimed at being a history or culture lesson, but it is obvious at many points that the developers could have taken the easy out and not chosen to spend a bit of time emphasising the strength of the Native American people and spirit.

Prey proves at once that there is plenty of fun left in shooting aliens, and also that there is still room for innovation in the genre without resorting to gimmicks that tire quickly. The campaign will take between six and ten hours to complete, depending on how many radio broadcasts you listen to, how long you spend figuring out some of the more challenging puzzles and how often you find yourself death walking. Coupled with a simple deathmatch mode that is fun just for having truly three-dimensional battles against other people, Prey is the most original shooter of the year. While the combat mechanics of the underlying Doom 3 engine are not up to the level of SiN Episodes Emergence or Half-Life 2: Episode One, this is a solid shooter that adult fans of the genre should definitely check out.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).