As soon as you open our exclusive review in PCPP#129 (July 26 people!) you'll see I make the point that I was never much of a fan of Doom 3.

For me, id's masterpiece remains the original Doom - a game that brought new things to the PC both from a technical and a gameplay standpoint. Not only does Doom offer multi-levelled pseudo-3D environments, but it also offers innovative gameplay in the form of its "shifting-maze" style dynamic architecture.

Since Doom, id's subsequent engines have all been capable of delivering the same level of gameplay, but for some reason never did. Quake had a few shifting blocks here and there, but the architecture was much more static than in Doom. And Doom 3, while hinting at the potential of the engine, gave us little more than a 10 hour corridor crawl.

So what strikes you immediately as you boot up your new copy of Prey is that this is a game that uses the Doom 3 engine, but really shows off what the technology can offer. Forget simple corridors, simple doors, simple laws of physics. This is a world of the imagination, and that imagination has run riot.

Prey is a shooter, a pure unadulterated shooter. It's not bogged down by extra features, but by the same token it become apparent very early on in your experience with it, that it's going to show you a whole bunch of new stuff that you haven't encountered in an FPS before.

Quake has a secret level at the end of Episode 1 called Ziggurat Vertigo. It shows that in even a very old 3D engine you can do a lot more than just put up pretty walls. This is a level that has the gravity turned down, which makes the experience of deathmatching in it extremely different.

But it was just one level, and a secret one at that. Prey makes sure this kind of thing happens all the time. After you've played the game for only a few hours, you will have seen it manipulate gravity, size, and even the concept of death.

The story is typically FPS-lean, and you've read all about it elsewhere. The game doesn't do a lot to flesh out its characters or create a believable world, although the internal consistency of the fiction is MUCH better than in Doom 3.

Thanks to the use of overhead radio broadcasts from Earth, you get a sense of the chaos on the ground even as you unleash chaos all around you. It's good, solid B-grade schlock, with all its attendant exploding tentacles and cartoonish gore.

Prey is arguably more gruesome than Doom 3, but because everything has that patina of good rollicking adventure, it avoids the slightly distasteful nature of some of Doom 3's visuals. Prey will give you plenty of scares, but they're fun scares, not disturbing scares. The level of blood is so extreme, it's like those movies where a guy gets an obviously papier-mache head cut off and blood fountains all over the room for about thirty seconds.

The cartoonish nature of the violence is further accentuated by the fact the player can't die. Various previews about the place hint at this, but the dynamic is quite interesting. When killed, lead character Tommy is transported to the spirit plane where he must fire arrows at the "dishonoured dead", shooting gallery style.