Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Primal Prey beats all of the games from the Carnivores series. It also beats other dinosaur-related games, for example Jurassic Park Operation Genesis etc. But why is this? At first sights, Primal Prey looks nothing more than a wannabe hunting game, or some kind of spoof of some of its more original predecessors. To put it simply, it's not. It's possibly my favourite PC game of all time.
The graphics are nothing special. The dinosaurs and the plants all look pretty blocky, and the water is completely still and plain. The weapons look a bit like something out of the star-trek laser gun genre, and all look pretty dorky at first. However, once you get used to them, they start looking a bit more hard-core. I am not saying the graphics are bad, though- the dinosaurs move smoothly, and I also like the way that if you stay in one hunting area too long the sky gets gradually darker until you wish you'd brought your night vision goggles. Primal Prey has cleverly grouped all the dinosaurs into male and female- the males are generally more vibrantly coloured, and are protective over the females. This is good progression from the Carnivores series, which had no concept of gender whatsoever. Also, if you shoot a dinosaur, it leaves a scar on its hide, and shoot it with a tranquilizer dart, and you can see the dart protruding from it's skin. It's nothing much, but it adds more realism to the game. There is quite a lot of blood, too. It's amazing how much blood is emitted from shooting a Troodon with a rifle.
The sound is solid stuff. The addition of frogs croaking, pterosaurs cawing in the distance, and the ever-present buzzing of crickets make you feel as though you are actually walking through a late-cretacious landscape. Walk in quicksand and you'll hear your hunter groaning under the strain of walking knee-high in the mud, and eventuall you'll start to drown. The drowning, I must say, isn't very well done. Your player starts shrieking as soon as you begin to sink, as though you're being stabbed, and even after your final cry of anguish, for some reason you can still hear the hunter grunting and groaning. All the other noises, like the dinosaur calls are perfecly added and dubbed. Well, I suppose there are some problems. After killing a T-rex, you'll watch him fall to the floor silently, then about a minute later you'll hear a loud THUD, when he should have neen hitting the floor. Oh well.
The AI is spectacular. The carnivores really will hunt the herbivores, not just you, and upon hearing a predator the herbivores will run off in fear until they are re-grouped with their herd. Say you sniped a Utahraptor with a rifle, the other pack members, upon noticing the death, will run around blindly for a second, until noticing you- then there's trouble afoot. I bet the raptors say 'I've got a BONE to pick with you!' Ha ha! Ha. Er, anyway, the fantastic Quetzalcoatlus, a huge pterosaur, will actually attack you if shot at. This came as a surprise to me the first time I set out to hunt one- I shot at it, expecting it to change direction and fly off, but no- it roared loudly, and swooped down, coming to get me! AAAGH! It doesn't do this with any of the other dinos, though. I suppose that's because they never attack it.
Right, what else? I don't know what 'gameplay' means, so I'll skip that aspect. The conclusion is that Primal Prey is a fabulous one-timer, and I recomend you buy it if you are interested in hunting and dinosaurs.
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