The debut trailer for Prey 2 is out and I’ll be honest with you: if you’re hoping to learn something useful, you’re in for a big disappointment.
Released in 2006 after a long and convoluted development process that began around the time of Duke Nukem 3D, Prey wasn’t a masterpiece but it was a very solid and often underrated shooter. It followed the rather tragic adventure of Domasi “Tommy” Towadi, a Cherokee who’s forced to embrace the heritage he’s spent his life running from when the Earth is attacked by a massive, organic spaceship. The game featured a number of innovations like portals and reversible gravity but is perhaps best known for its doors, which could most accurately be described as “vaginal.”
So what’s the deal for Prey 2? It’s hard to tell from this trailer, a live-action affair set on an airliner that has an unfortunate encounter with some glowing green lights. An air marshal pulls his weapon and opens fire on something; what he’s shooting at remains a mystery but it’s pretty obvious that whatever it is, it doesn’t end well for the passengers.
But gamers who played the original Prey may recall that an airliner did appear in the game, first as it crashed into the ship and then later as a charred, wrecked hulk, and according to Kotaku, that’s the plane in the trailer. Players step into the role of the air marshal, who ends up fending off aliens aboard the invading ship until the game somehow leaps forward to a future in which he’s become the only human bounty hunter in the galaxy at work on “a seedy alien planet.”
It’s a clever way to tie the two games together and while the premise is intriguing, it also strikes me as not very Prey-like. Maybe that’s not entirely fair given that there’s only been one other game in the series, but the Native American “angle” was a constant throughout the drawn-out development of the first game and now it sounds like the sequel will be just another generic “dude in space” shooter. It’s still way too soon to make any kind of judgment since at this point Prey 2 doesn’t even have a release target, but I have to admit that at this very early stage in the game I’m just a wee bit nervous.
