Gravity shmavity
Ah yes, gravity. It’s a weird thing… it’s what keeps us all stuck to the Earth and what makes apples fall on scientists heads and as yet, no-one has figured out a way to defeat it… except the aliens who have sort of figured that one out.
The Dysonsphere is essentially a small planet, so therefore it has its own localized gravity, which affects Tommy for most of his time running around the ‘sphere. But the aliens have developed some natty technology to create walkways that allow you to stroll on up the walls and across the ceiling giving you access to other areas of the ship. Jump off these walkways though and you’ll fall back to whichever way the bottom is.
This adds a whole new aspect to the gameplay as now not only do you have to look out ahead of you for bad guys, but also above, behind, below and just about every other angle too. Throw in the spirit walking and you’ve got a whole new set of challenges.
Click for larger imageSome areas even have switchable gravity for the whole area so shooting a panel above you makes the wall or ceiling the ‘floor’ as it were. Again, this makes otherwise inaccessible areas available… and once you couple that with spirit walking you’ve got a very interesting time ahead of you.
But the use of gravity doesn’t just stop with walkways and gravity fields; you’ve got true gravity to deal with too. I’m not going to pretend to understand even the slightest hint of how gravity works other than to say that any object with mass exerts a gravitational pull on all other objects. The mass of the object dictates the gravitational pull relative to that object, so later on, when you’re outside of the Dysonsphere’s main core, you’ll find gravity to be far less than before and you might even find yourself being pulled in a variety of directions.
Click for larger imageOne stage of Prey sees you take over a mini-space scooter type vehicle and go for a zoom off outside. You’ll eventually land on an asteroid that’s being processed for raw materials and here gravity is less than inside the core, so you’ll take bigger jumps and bounds and the physics affecting how explosions work are subject to the lower gravity too… all in all, an engaging and refreshingly new approach!