You know how some games have that one pivotal thing? Shooting through walls with the Rail Gun in Red Faction, dealing tough love to Headcrabs wielding Half-Life's crowbar, the sheer vastness of the armies you command in the Total War games ... they're all cool elements with real sucker punch potential. Now, imagine four or five of these "one things" crammed into a single game. That's Prey.

Both the shooter genre and the concept of "alien" have been re-imagined. You are Tommy, an embittered Cherokee mechanic snatched from Earth by a bizarre, living spaceship. Shortly after your abduction, you find yourself free on the ship, but fighting for survival against hordes of alarmingly grotesque aliens who populate it. The trouble is, the bad guys have a serious homefield advantage. Your sense of direction gets kicked in the crotch the moment you board. Forget what you learned about gravity, physics and even map reading in high school; that stuff doesn't apply here.

That glowing walkway that snakes up the gooey, fleshy wall? It's actually a self-contained gravitational field that lets you run right onto walls and even ceilings. It only gets stranger when you enter a chamber where the simple push of a button swaps gravity, sending anything that isn't nailed down plummeting toward the new 'floor'. Playing with the relaxed laws of physics is fun until paranoia strikes and you realize that your enemies can stalk you from all six directions: front, back, left, right, above and sometimes even below.