While the first-person shooter (FPS) genre has been stinking of mothballs for years, it remains a successful, viable game archetype--mainly because shooting things from the first person perspective is eternally cathartic.

Still, to date, most all of them have been completely interchangeable; you're Joe Loner, you have a gun, you're in a building with only one way out, you shoot things, you get out, you're outside but delimited by insurmountable cliffs or foliage, which is kind of like being in a building with only one way out, you find new a new gun, you shoot new things... and so it goes.

In a long-overdue moment of eureka, 2K Games' Prey breathes new life into the gracefully decrepit genre by, well, breathing life into the game, its environments, its weapons. That is to say, Prey mainly takes place on a malevolent alien spacecraft/world which itself seems to be a living, organic thing, replete with many a squishy slurpy sounds and vivid visuals that would make a proctologist blush. Weapons found (on top of your default pipe wrench) are sometimes equally organic, like explosive tri-pedal frog/spider thingies that you wield like a grenade, much to their chagrin. There's a leech gun that works both ways; you replenish your health not with an insta-medkit, but by breathing in a cloud of stewing microbes. Ultimately, we're still talking standard tools of the FPS trade, but the variations are truly fresh and lend themselves nicely to the game's other innovations.

The ubiquitous corridor encasements of FPS games are likewise turned upside down--quite literally. Prey's levels are designed using all three dimensions, including judicious placement of some whacked out, gravity-defying walkways and parapets that have you climbing the walls and walking the ceilings, which always remain the floor from your first-person perspective, but still makes for a dizzying, exhilarating experience as your surroundings go topsy-turvy. Bad guys shoot at you sideways from that seemingly-upside-down doorway, go flying up to the floor when they lose traction. Add to that some disembodied "spiritwalking" (also a refreshing way to respawn) and the playing field, though still confining, is virtually limitless.

Speaking of doorways: they are a varied sort, from typical airlocks to organic, puckered pathways as repulsive as the effluent they're prone to spew, to mind-bending mirror/worm-hole/teleporter portals that also work as peep holes to other worlds. It's all totally surreal and way cool because of it.

Moreover, those innovations are only the half of Prey's resounding freshness. The game also breaks ground with its character and story. It's steeped in a bold but reverent brew of old Cherokee spiritualism and young Cherokee angst as main character Tommy (you) is clearly conflicted by his desire to get off his decaying reservation, his girlfriend's desire to stay and his freshly departed grandfather's disembodied guidance to mysticism throughout, all of which becomes suddenly significant considering the nature of the aforementioned transcendental proctology nightmare of his surroundings.

Still, if you're not a fan of FPS games then Prey does little to change your mind. In fact, it's so bizarre it may only stand to reinforce your lack of interest. At the same time, however, fans of I-am-the-shooter games will be categorically blown away.

• TIP: You can get up to 1000 achievement points in Prey (X360), with the highest rewarding tasks including completing the game on Normal difficulty (65 points) and again on Cherokee difficulty (another 65) as well as completing various missions (15 - 50). You can also score points in the multiplayer modes by getting 25 kills with the pipe wrench (10) or reaching 125 kills total in team death match (15), among other things.