The main character in Prey is Tommy, a native North American. Not Korean, nor Japanese, not Iraqi nor British but North American Indian. Mix in some native American mythology and a couple of wandering spirits, a few aliens invading Earth, and you've got the recipe for either one heck of a game, or a complete and utter disaster.

From the depictions we absorbed at E3 last year, Prey was going to revolutionise the way we play FPS games. That's a lot for any game to live up to. And let's face it; we've heard it all before. So, we'll stop feeding the hype engine and do what needs to be done. Let's rip apart this beast and go for the jugular. We came prepared; we have handy towels.

Single player Prey certainly starts out well. The story begins with Tommy in a bar where his girlfriend is working. Tommy has his heart set on leaving the dead-end reservation to make a life elsewhere. The only problem is he can't persuade his girlfriend to leave with him. On top of that, Tommy's grandfather believes in spirits and wants Tommy to start believing in them, too.

Kind of whacky, but we like it so far. As you move around the bar, you can easily interact with all sorts of things from the music box to the arcade games. Prey is highly interactive right from the beginning. A few minutes pass and the two gang members at the bar start to get a little edgy. They're drunk and looking for a fight. Tommy reaches for the wrench and before you know it, these guys are taking swings at you. This is your first taste of combat in the game, and it seems to go OK, but with a wrench of all things?

After beating the two guys to a bloody pulp, the room begins to shake. You soon realise it's not an earthquake. Suddenly, your grandfather and your girlfriend are being sucked upwards towards the sky by some sort of strange traction beam. You don't know what it is, but you know you need to help them. Before you can move, you're being sucked up right along with them.

For an opening sequence, it's quite intense. From that point on, the game pretty much takes on the form of something almost familiar, but not quite. A little Doom-esque, perhaps in appearance, the game environments are dark and gloomy as you find yourself transported into an alien ship. What develops is the true nature of Prey; kill or be killed, hunt the target and eliminate it. You're on a mission to save your girlfriend and you have no idea where she is. You're stuck on an alien spacecraft running blind.

The first thing Tommy needs to do is find a weapon. At the beginning, weapons are very limited. Not only are they limited but they're alien to you. And we could probably dedicate an entire page to the weapons alone. The weaponry is easy to use and work exactly the same way as most weapons do in an FPS. Point and shoot seems to work but the weapons also have a secondary attack capability. Have fun finding out what they are.

Some weapons have a zoom option as well. You'll get to use weapons that do all sorts of nifty things like shoot out some form of acid at your opponent and fire acid bombs. Some weapons can be upgraded - you'll need to discover how to do that. Remember to use your environment; there will be obstacles that you will face to progress through certain areas of the map that require some thinking. Nothing too difficult, anyone should be able to pull it off, regardless of your experience. Remember, you always have your trusty wrench on hand. Toggling through weapons is easy as well. You can set up your keys at any time by pressing the escape key to get to the game options.

Navigation in the game is also pretty basic and should be easy for most FPS gamers used to the W, A, S, D keys for movement. Again, you can set these keys under options if you're not comfortable with the default settings. There are also two different game modes to choose from in Prey: Normal or Cherokee mode.

The graphics, environments and textures used in Prey are, simply, out of this world and you will get every opportunity to crank that hardware up to the highest settings if you so desire. Prey is one game that certainly deserves to be played on the best hardware you can afford. The one thing that keeps your eyes plastered to the screen during Prey is how smooth it handles and how great it looks. If you don't have the hardware to play this game, don't even bother. Prey is best experienced on gaming hardware that won't jerk or make gameplay tedious, especially on the multiplayer side of things, but we'll get to that in a moment.