Last year Bethesda served up nifty mind-scrambling sci-fi Prey which, for all its initially exciting mystery and alien-smearing fun, grew a little tiresome and samey. Disappointing, really, as the first few hours were some strong work.
It goes a little like this:
In the future one can boost one’s abilities with alien-enhanced Neuromods. Like steroids for y’noodle. Studying the aliens, Typhons, and how they can help make us all so gosh-darn clever is TranStar, a company which has grown rather plump from the sales of such tech. Got that? Anyway, in the original game, the spaceship on which all this is set, Talos I, has become rather badly overrun by said life forms (boo) and, to top it all off, your bad self has lost his (or her, thanks to Bethesda’s welcome gender-friendly options) memory (double boo).
And, as I say, the first few hours’ gaming are a fine affair, but the ship’s corridors and gameplay start haemorrhaging variety pretty swiftly from there on. However, there are some decent scares stuffed in there.
A year on and Bethesda have served up a stunning wee tonic in the form of the Mooncrash DLC. This time you’re spying for TranStar’s rival trying to figure out what in blazes went wrong on the Pytheas Moonbase. Five frankly bizarre Transtar employees escaped and your boss wants answers.
To do this requires one to run the gamut of a simulation which will result in an almighty amount of death. But this is necessary in order to earn sim points to buy gear and unlock neuromods, all of which carry over to your next turn, so the more you die the better prepared you are to splatter Typhons and learn how each character made their way off the base.
It’s a chunky DLC which will run you an extra 10 or so hours of playing time, and takes care of the variety problem by scrambling the base’s elements every time a character dies.
In Mooncrash death isn’t the end, it’s a shop in which to load your pockets full of alien death.
And there’s no better resurrection than that.
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