Prey review: sci-fi shooter mashup is less than sum of its parts

Bethesda's reimagining of the popular shooting game combines the best of Bioshock, Dead Space and Dishonored but does little extra with them

Nearly everything good about Prey is pulled from a game released in the decade before it. Well, four other games to be exact. As Morgan Yu, you are thrust into the aftermath of a failed research project with only a wrench for protection, just like Jack in BioShock. The desolate, ruined space station setting brings back memories of Dead Space, and the experimental gameplay takes cues from Dishonored, which was also developed by Franco-US studio Arkane. Then there's the fact that it re-imagines the original Prey, a well-received sci-fi shooter from 2006, which mixed extraterrestrial and Native American themes to compelling effect.

The new Prey takes the highlights of these games, but merely allows them to coexist in a single habitat, never doing anything new with the foundational building blocks it has borrowed. The game takes place in the year 2032, in an alternate reality where President John F Kennedy was never assassinated but instead worked with the Soviet Union to launch the Talos 1 space station. Waking up in the space station as either the male or female version of Morgan Yu, the player embarks on a journey to rediscover the past of a protagonist we are given no information about at first. This is a decidedly mundane storyline, in what should have been a race against time to stop the alien threat aboard Talos 1 from making it's way back to Earth.