Prey

Prey, by 2K Games, is a first-person shooter which offers somewhat more than stand and shoot game play. In Prey, you control Tommy, a Cherokee who wants nothing more than to take his girlfriend and leave the reservation. Then he (and his girl, and his grandfather, and the entire bar the three of them are in) is abducted by a horrific race of aliens. A malfunction in the assembly line he's loaded onto frees him, and he sets out to give his abductors an ass full of pipe wrench. Tommy may be the only hope humanity has against the alien menace, But he's really only interested in saving his girl, and getting the hell home.

Prey has a variety of interesting hooks. Tommy reacts verbally in fairly realistic ways to his environment, level design makes use of gravity manipulation, wormholes, changes in scale, and an interesting grab bag of both biological and mechanical scene elements. Also, the aliens have a number of monitors tuned into Art Bell's late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM, which is covering the events on the ground.

The biggest hook however, is Spirit-Walking. Tapping into ancestral Cherokee medicine, Tommy can leave his body to walk into areas that are otherwise inaccessible, and to hunt his enemies without risking his physical form. Not that his physical form is all that precious. Upon death, Tommy has the opportunity to hunt wraiths for a short time, in order to resurrect himself and continue the fight. While this ability does mean you won't spend any time re-hashing previously completed areas, it also means that the challenge is functionally non-existent, because Tommy is basically immortal.

Sadly, while the first half of the game is clever, many of the design elements that make it so lose their color fairly quickly, and the latter half of the game is little more than a run and gun experience. And it's LONG.

My recommendation is to rent it, play until you stop being confused, horrified, and disoriented, and return it, confident that your five dollars was well-spent.