AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Prey mooncrash review1/22/2024 ![]() ![]() Mooncrash does more than overcome the main game’s biggest inherent problem though. This means that players will eventually get to try out everything instead of pigeon-holing themselves into a single skill set. Instead they have five to work with, all of whom have their own skill trees to progress along. Players of Mooncrash aren’t limited to developing one single character over the course of twenty hours. It’s a masterful choice of scenario because it allows Mooncrash to side-step all of the constraints that hold the main Prey game back. The player’s character is tasked with running through this simulation from the perspectives of multiple persons within it in the hope that they’ll be able to discover what happened at the real-life version of the base. The bulk of Prey: Mooncrash plays out in a corrupted simulation of an isolated research base on the Moon. ![]() Just releasing a story-centric expansion wouldn’t fix this problem, so Arkane Studios tried something different in the form of Prey: Mooncrash, an add-on that manages to put the full suite of Prey’s systems in the hands of its players. Focusing on one skill tree or another means that most players won’t experience most of what Prey has to offer since seeing more would mean committing to additional playthroughs. These limitations are good in that they encourage players to build a highly-specialized character, but there’s an inherent drawback to this approach. On the flipside, human abilities result in fewer encounters but also less power when they inevitably occur. Power carries consequences in Prey Choosing Typhon abilities grants plenty of raw power, but makes one into a target. Prey’s contribution to this kind of system is its addition of consequences into the mix. ![]() No matter what kind of problem the player is confronted with, they have all the tools they need to create their own solution to it. It’s an evolution of the emergent gameplay found in the likes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and DisHonored. Prey’s story might not be the best, but its gameplay shouldn’t be missed. It’s not a perfect game, but its creators got enough right that one can’t help but feel like it deserves more attention. Mostly the moon shark, though.Prey (2017) is doomed to be a cult classic rather than the outright hit it deserves to be. My only issues with it are that, much like the base game, Mooncrash’s loading times are excessive, and the moon shark is an asshole. ![]() That’s about 20 hours more than I’d play most other games before becoming distracted with something else, and I’m still finding new stuff in it – new puzzles, new strategies, new ways for everything to go so very wrong, abruptly and spectacularly. I’ve clocked almost 25 hours with this DLC. If you can’t hack through a locked door, for example, you can morph into a book and slide through the bars on the window instead. Like Prey, the expansion is also about solving problems, and much of its fun is working out inventive solutions. Mooncrash is about repetition, failure, and – maybe – an occasional success. Without dropping spoilers, there’s a clever narrative conceit to accommodate this eccentric setup, and despite its uncompromising terms, the difficulty is mitigated by some persistent aspects – you keep your unlocks between resets, including installed neuromods, fabrication plans, and chipsets, and other paraphernalia, so you can gear up before trying again. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |