Prey [PC]

Prey has a lot going for it. Not least is the fact that sometimes -- particularly during the slow summer stretch before the torrent of holiday releases -- you just want a crazy ride of a shooter. It helps that this crazy ride is always gorgeous, sometimes clever, and never frustrating. Prey is as timely, entertaining, and over-produced as a typical summer popcorn movie. Just brace yourself for liberal helpings of typical summer dumb.

The graphics are gorgeous, with a few exceptions. The human character models look clunky, particularly the damsel in distress, who has a pair of wicked ball-and-socket shoulders and freaky elf ears. On a few occasions when the action drops you into some vast open area, you can see how all the detail suddenly has to scram in order to keep the game from slowing down. But for the most part, Prey is easily one of the best looking shooters you can play.

It's partly the technology and partly the artwork, which presents a dark gooey glistening alien world made out of metal and ooze. You'll meet a handful of monsters, almost all of whom memorable. Take time to watch them before blowing them away, and you might find some surprising details.

Crab-like centaurs appear and disappear through what can only be described as, well, gigantic female genitals. The colossal hybrid beasts twirl with the grace and bulk of a hippo ballerina from Disney's Fantasia. You'll also come across some serenely beautiful and weird tableaus. The whole vibe of the game is supposed to be dark and eerie and icky, and the graphics and art design do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to how well Prey establishes this tone.

Prey also uses some really clever space-bending tricks to provide a few "oh wow!" moments and a handful of really gratifying puzzles. The pacing occasionally slows down when you need to discover the way out of a room, but it almost always leads to an "a-ha!" rather than a, "How was I supposed to have figured that out?"

The multiplayer levels, which take full advantage of these space-bending tricks, are almost too funky. If you're at all prone to motion sickness during first-person shooters (and even if you're not), "MultiPrey" is liable to make you feel a little queasy. Frankly, we admire any game that can do this, so consider it a ringing endorsement for a very different kind of deathmatching. It may be the only mode you get, but with gravity shenanigans, dimensional portals, and attacks that can come from any nook or cranny ("Look out, he's standing on the upper-left corner of the wall behind you and to your right!"), it's anything but typical. It's particularly hard to keep up with the multiplayer craziness on a gamepad, but Prey is otherwise very well suited to the Xbox 360 in terms of controls and graphics.