Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006
Prey (for PC, Xbox 360)
OK, you're a Native American guy, and you're bummed because a bunch of frankly pretty gross-looking aliens just flew and down and slurped up your whole reservation, including your sweetie. Not cool. It's rare that we get any genuinely innovative takes on the shoot-'em-up genre, but Prey has some really smart ideas about how to use the dangerously realistic Doom 3 engine — watch for fun with teleportation portals and some gnarly firefights in variable gravity. The alien ship blends the organic and the technological in really disturbing ways, and unlike in Doom 3 they don't go overboard with the shadows — you can actually see the full horror before you kill it.