Oh you read that right… this is a game, for Mac. I’ll give you just a minute to catch your breath as you redefine your handle on reality. Read the review after the jump.

Prey is a first person shooter game that plays a little like Doom, borrowing many elements from other sci-fi first person shooting titles. Prey was first developed by Human Head Studios and produced by 3D Realms. It’s been on PC and Xbox 360 before being brought to the Mac by Aspyr Media.

You play as Tommy, a rebellious Cherokee Indian living in a present day Indian reservation. Gone are the days of the glorious Cherokee warrior, Tommy is just a bitter mechanic who hates being trapped on the reservation and desires to leave that boring place for something more.

What Tommy wants, soon Tommy gets… but not at all in the way that he expects. All over the news there are reports of strange crafts outside, and every video gamer knows that means alien invasion. It’s not long before Tommy is sucked through the ceiling, along with his girlfriend and grandfather in a very stereotypical alien abduction type scenario.

The next thing you know, Tommy is on board a really disgusting space ship called “The Sphere”. The sphere sucks up material alive and inanimate, then crunches it up and uses it for fuel and to make hybrid alien creatures which you later fight. The sphere appears to be alive, with many of the doors and corridors made of living material. 

Immediately you (the gamer) are treated to some intense and graphic visuals, including some pretty graphic deaths of people that Tommy knows. As you work your way through the different corridors of the sphere, you get to bash aliens with a big wrench and eventually you recover some pretty fun alien toys to do your killing. (If you haven't picked up on it already, this isn't a game for kids.)

I found the choice of a Cherokee Indian as the lead character quite interesting, and soon into the plot of the game I was treated to some interesting elements which helped to shift Prey away from the stereotypes of other first person shooting games (which was a saving grace for this title, I almost stopped playing when I saw another FPS with a pipe wrench as a primary weapon!) Tommy’s grandfather is killed fairly early in the title, and his spirit teaches Tommy some spiritual powers which aide Tommy in his quest to find his girlfriend and get off the sphere.

Tommy is lead by his spirit guide (a ghost of a pet hawk he had as a child), and can “death walk” (leave his body and sneak up on people.) The death walk mode is interesting because it has its roots in actual Indian folklore, plus it’s just an interesting mode of game play. In addition to the neat game play you get from Tommy’s Indian powers, you also have some interesting physics in the game as you walk on walls with the games “gravity flipping” feature. Between the varied gravity and the integration of in game portals, you do get a sense of being in an alternate reality.

I don’t think I found much in Prey that I haven’t seen in other games. Prey was probably a little more revolutionary feeling about 3 years ago, but I can’t hold the timing of a ported game against it.

There were a few strikes against Prey that kept it from really being a home run for me.

The first thing I noticed about this game was the extensive load times and choppy graphics. I ran Prey on a new MacBook running the most current version of Mac OS X, with a 2.4 GHz core duo processor and 2 GB of RAM. While I know the MacBook  doesn’t have the same video capability as a pro would have, it shouldn’t have choked on Prey, which requires a 1.8 GHz or faster processor and just 512 MB of RAM.  Prey wasn’t supposed to run at all on MacBook because of the integrated video chipset, so I won’t hold this against how it scores.

Another problem I had was the response of the mouse. I tried the onboard mouse, I tried a mighty mouse, and I tried a Logitech media mouse… and all my response times seemed lagged. When engaged in epic battle against aliens I want my mouse to move the way my hand moves, when my hand moves.

My last problem was the cliché demonstrated by this first person shooter. I hate cliché. Innovation has always driven Mac, and to see a port of a game that follows very closely the archetypes of previous first person shooters (i.e. a wrench as a melee weapon, stealing alien guns etc…) is a tired and uncreative theme in gaming. Knowing that this game was ported and not developed exclusively for Mac makes that digestible, but I do crave something more in Mac gaming, and I am interested to see what Aspyr will do in the near future.

Graphically Prey was an interesting, sometimes disgusting game. While the graphics weren’t cutting edge, they were sufficient for an immersive gaming experience. The audio in this game wasn’t bad at all; the soundtrack should be recognizable to most gamers. I loved the fact that you can turn profanity off in the options menu, the profanity seemed forced and unnecessary anyway, but I was able to play this title around younger gamers without the need for headphones.