You might remember the original Prey as one of the better games to grace the Xbox 360 during the uneven first year of the console’s life. A few unique features made this first-person shooter stand out from the crowd, including its use of portals before Portal.

To be published by Bethesda Softworks for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in 2012, the followup game puts you not in the role of prey but of predator. You’re a human bounty hunter scraping out an existence on an alien settlement by tracking down intergalactic scum and delivering them to clients. (Yes, this is technically Samus Aran’s job, although we never see her actually do it in Metroid games.)

So, while Prey 2 might look like a shooter and might be the sequel to a shooter, it isn’t one.

The visual style of the game, says developer Human Head Studios, is “alien noir.” The scientific explanation for this is that on the planet Exodus, one side always faces the sun and one side is always dark, so there is an area around the equator in which it is always dusk — that wonderful time of day so evocative of mystery and suspense.

As a bounty hunter, you’ll be able to freely roam Exodus and figure out how you’re going to earn money. You may see an alien being assaulted by other, meaner aliens. Maybe you jump in and help him, then ask for cash. Or maybe you go after bigger targets. Speaking with clients will let you take on missions, looking for specific dudes. To find them, maybe you’ve got to go talk to an informant. Maybe said informant wants 2,000 credits before he’ll talk. Maybe you pay him, or maybe you just shoot his henchman and tell him he’s next if he doesn’t spill the beans.

Walking into an alien bar, casino or strip club, you can pull out your handy scanner to detect who these people are. If a target shows up, you’ll know it. Now, do you want to try to capture him dead or alive? Maybe the client doesn’t care, but maybe they need him breathing. In that case, you might use your bolo weapon to ensnare him as you’re chasing him down the street. Catch him and you’ll have another choice: Send him to the client forthwith, or interrogate him using torture, which might kill him. Then again, maybe he’ll pay you more than the client would have if you just let him go.

Exodus isn’t just a maze of corridors. The world will be quite vertical, Human Head says. You’ll have some acrobatic abilities; you can hang onto ledges, jump high, take daring leaps. Eventually you’ll find some hoverboots that let you glide down without killing yourself.

If you want to be a huge jerk, you can do that, too. Why bother helping that hapless citizen and hoping he’ll give you a reward when you can just kill him and ransack his pockets? Only if you do that, watch out for the eye in the sky: Police robots are always watching, looking for crimes and punishing offenders. Then again, if you’ve got a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, you could probably just obliterate that, too.

Prey 2 holds a lot of potential, although the demo that I saw at Bethesda’s pre-E3 event last month was a highly scripted, carefully controlled affair. If it can create an open-ended game that lives up to these promises, Prey 2 will be a welcome break from the run-of-the-mill shooter.