Although Duke Nukem Forever has become the favorite subject for gamer jokes and it’s basically synonymous with the notion of vaporware, it’s not the only title that 3DRealms have announced only to be lost afterwards in the cracks of time. If it had seen the light of day in 1998 as planned, Prey would have been the revolution of the first person shooter genre instead of the now famous Half-Life. Unfortunately, 3DRealms' ambitions were a bit too bold for that time, so the project was eventually shelved – one of the many games that “could have…”. Nobody expected George Broussard to casually announce at E3 2005 that Prey had been resurrected and is now in development in a 3rd party studio. Naturally, the questions and discussions started to flood internet forums: who were the developers? What engine will the game use? When’s was it going to be released? The answers came surprisingly fast considering that we’re talking about 3DRealms – Human Head Studios were the developers. The engine used? An improved version of the one used in Doom 3. Release date? Somewhere in 2006. And not surprisingly, the game would find its way to the Xbox 360 as well. Fast-forward a year later. The 11th of July has come and gone and Prey is already available in stores. Now, only one question remains: is it any good? Yes it is. And the remarkable thing is that Prey is basically an old-school shooter with certain modern elements, introduced by Human Head partly make the game competitive and partly to keep the original game’s identity.

     The designers stated from the start that the game was going to be single-player oriented, so the storyline as well as the characters were redone but the general idea remained the same. You’re Tommy, a native-american mechanic who hates his heritage and wants to leave the reservation he’s in to build a new life. But there’s a problem. His girlfriend (yes, there’s always a girlfriend) likes her life as it is and doesn’t want to go anywhere. Nevertheless, this minor argument doesn’t come to a closure because Tommy, along with his girlfriend and grandfather are abducted by an alien ship and taken to a mysterious sphere that has just appeared in Earth’s orbit. Since Tommy doesn’t give a damn about the rest of the world, his main goal after he escapes will be to free his girlfriend and go home. Although it won’t win any awards for originality, Prey’s storyline does its job well and there are a couple of plot-twists along the way that will keep you interested right until the end of the game. And to the designer’s credit, the aliens don’t fall in the age old cliché of “We are attacking Earth because we are evil, fear us”.