Dead Space the Third

[Kopikatsu]

So, I've only just now gotten to near the end of where the demo was in DS3. (Had to stop due to extreme pain from a medical thing).

What it does right:

The atmosphere is a bit...lacking compared to the previous entries, but it's still very good. I don't think the game has actually gotten less atmospheric so much as...you can only see blood and marker-graffiti covered rooms so many times before it starts getting same-y. There is an interesting little scene where Issac tries to translate some of it, though. "Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off."

The fact that the microtransactions exist is very noninvasive (It tells you that triangle is the button to bring up that menu alongside all of the other controls, but hasn't gone further than that yet) and they're really not needed. To be perfectly honest, I feel like I'm progressing a bit too fast as it is even without using them at all. Also, there's some fun little DLC that I'm considering picking up, like adding a sarcastic voice to your Scavanger Bot (Without it, it just makes little beeping sounds). Additionally, all of the resource DLC can be purchased with Ration Seals, which you get ingame via Savanager Bot.

The game mostly features 200+ year old Necromorphs, and they look the part. All of the enemy designs have been rehauled to show off their degregation, and I think it works very well. There's a point where you find a group of malnourished Necromorphs from a group of people that were left to starve- those things are freaky.

Freedom! I don't actually consider this a plus per se, but I know that people on the Escapist are all about it. There are now optional missions and the beginning area has a bunch of free-roam space exploration with lots of goodies hidden about. Six~ (maybe more) chapters are spent in space, so you're actually up there for a while.

Crazy dance party. There's an optional mission where you're sent to hunt a guy down. Unfortunately for you, he has a bunch of traps rigged up. A favorite of his is blowing out all of the air vents in a room, set it into quarantine mode, and then blast country music over the PA system while you get swarmed with Necros. It's hilarious and confusing at the same time.

Co-Op! I've only played single player so far (Due to having to pause constantly because of the pain), but at no point did I feel like I was missing out because I didn't have a partner, nor did it feel like they cut content to make it work. And Co-Op was pretty great when I tried it in the demo, so no complaints there.

Necromorphs respond better to dying. I don't know how to explain this one really...but severing a limb or finishing off a Necromorph actually feels really good now. There are some things wrong with the combat, but that's for...

Things it does wrong.
Necromorphs don't respond very well to being shot usually. Using something like a Shotgun will get an effect, but I can dump five very high damaging bolts into a basic heavy Necro and they'll shrug it off like it's nothing. I know that's the point because they're supposed to be nigh immune to small arms fire, but it just bugs me a little. They could at least flinch or something, even if it doesn't actually slow them down.

I do feel like it's more action packed than the other entries (Early on, they throw TWO regenerators at you at the same time, and they continue to stalk you throughout the ship, getting stuck in tight quarters with them far too often for my comfort). There seem to be about 30-40% more Necromorphs than DS2, although I might just be misremembering. There are a ton of them though. This isn't helped by the fact that a number of them are actually armored with multiple forms, so it can take a lot to put them down for good.

There's a few things that are hard to believe. Like how we're expected to accept that there are bunch of guys who just happened to be carrying two axes each in the middle of an office building for no adequately explained reason. They have 'normal' Necromorphs in that area, so I have no idea why they choose then to introduce Axe-y McGee as an enemy type.

Spoiler: Wasted Potential

The guy leading the mission is now in a relationship with Ellie, and basically tells Issac to watch himself repeatedly, and is against the team continuing the mission. The tension starts to build and build...and then he gets killed out of nowhere because of Issac's negligence. I expected him to stick around and go rogue, but nope. Glass to the face. There really doesn't even seem to be an antagonist at this point, because everyone who acts suspicious either gets killed off or has been long dead since the beginning of the game. The biggest antagonist at this point, except for that one Unitologist from chapter one who has been strangely absent, was a tape recording of some shuttle pilot.

Edit: Seems I was wrong, because that guy (Robert Norton) showed up and did his...thing. So who the heck was it that died?

Human Enemies. Now, I don't think they're inherently a bad thing, but the game mechanics really just don't allow for satisfying gunplay vs humans. Thankfully they all die in one headshot (So far) and you can just throw grenades back, so every encounter with them has been very short lived.

Too much health/ammo. I'm actually a bit hesitant to put this one here for two reasons. First, my health stockpile plummeted once I actually got planetside. Still ridiculous amounts of ammo though. However, I am using the guns that came with the limited edition, which are super overpowered. It might be a lot more frantic without them. I plan on nerfing myself once I collect the parts to make a Carbine by itself. Already have a Medic Support Handgun for the one handed slot.

Anywho! If you have the game; how do you feel, and if you don't have the game, any questions?

 

[Sargonas42]

I too feel that i was swimming in health and ammo like you were, and also it felt like it "leveled out" some when I reached Tau Volantis finally at Chapter 8. However, I knocked things up from Normal to Hard because of this, and BOY was I in for a shock. Honestly it feels like 50% of what makes normal easier than hard is the high availability of items. It's definitely tied into the difficulty, so that pretty much explains that.

Also, since it's clear you've done it, what do you think of that shuttle mission? HOLY NUTBALLS THAT WAS FUN!

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well compared to DS1 I could almost call this a DmC style reboot, as in it shares the names and some visuals but it's not from the same franchise at all, it is far closer to Lost Planet... which is great for people who wanted Lost Planet, but if you wanted Dead Space then look elsewhere.

 

[Kopikatsu]

I too feel that i was swimming in health and ammo like you were, and also it felt like it "leveled out" some when I reached Tau Volantis finally at Chapter 8. However, I knocked things up from Normal to Hard because of this, and BOY was I in for a shock. Honestly it feels like 50% of what makes normal easier than hard is the high availability of items. It's definitely tied into the difficulty, so that pretty much explains that.

Also, since it's clear you've done it, what do you think of that shuttle mission? HOLY NUTBALLS THAT WAS FUN!

I didn't actaully like it, but I've never liked vehicle sections in any game ever. I did, however, like how it cut to a mini-cutscene so you could watch the ship fall apart around you. Does beg the question though, who was driving the shuttle while Isaac was fixing the engine? If it was Ellie, then why isn't she flying it the rest of the time so that Isaac can be free to fix the shuttle that's currently falling apart around them. As Isaac so eloquently puts it later in the game...

Carver: "What am I supposed to do? I'm not the Engineer."
Isaac: "HOW ABOUT YOU PUSH THE GODDAMN BUTTON?"

I did beat the game a few hours ago, and all I can say is...wow. That ending. Dat ending.

 

[Sargonas42]

Well compared to DS1 I could almost call this a DmC style reboot, as in it shares the names and some visuals but it's not from the same franchise at all, it is far closer to Lost Planet... which is great for people who wanted Lost Planet, but if you wanted Dead Space then look elsewhere.

I'll be honest, the reuse of the "its just lost planet" being used over and over gain is wearing thin on me, considering it takes 6 hours and 8 chapters before you even leave space set foot on Tau Volantis, and once you do only 1/3rd of your time is spent out doors on it...

Saying it is "not from the same franchise at all" is a terribly uninformed and recklessly inflammatory statement with no foundation. You can't say something like that when it so clearly is not true, because the only thing I can assume is that you are trying to troll us.

 

[Praetox]

I'm enjoying the game a lot so far, though I second the comment about items being too easy to come by on Normal difficulty. Is it on Normal or Hard that it's balanced out when you get to the planet? Anyway, I absolutely love the weapon crafting system. It's so much fun to think up and try new combinations.

 

[Sargonas42]

I'm enjoying the game a lot so far, though I second the comment about items being too easy to come by on Normal difficulty. Is it on Normal or Hard that it's balanced out when you get to the planet? Anyway, I absolutely love the weapon crafting system. It's so much fun to think up and try new combinations.

Things balance out some on Tau on Normal. Get down right curveballey on Hard. The thing is, Med Packs and Ammo are crafted from the two most abundant resources, so to be honest they are really almost always in supply if a bench is handy. It when you get into New Game+ mode and do some of the other play-styles that things start to get REALLY REALLY hard.

 

[TaboriHK]

Saying it is "not from the same franchise at all" is a terribly uninformed and recklessly inflammatory statement with no foundation. You can't say something like that when it so clearly is not true, because the only thing I can assume is that you are trying to troll us.

Then it's a troll army. I've heard nothing but "this game doesn't really fit the franchise in terms of tone." I mean, everyone. And saying "this game is no longer about claustrophobic horror" isn't a plus or a minus. Games need to have the space to breathe and change in my opinion. Otherwise it's just, "now Isaac's running around an even bigger ship! There's vents EVERYWHERE!!!!" saturation. It's reasonable to think that the Isaac of the first Dead Space can't truly be believably reproduced. He's not just a guy in a bad situation anymore. He's a hardened survivor. Which means that the third game has to depart from the franchise's initial offering.

Everyone needs to decide what they want from Dead Space for themselves. There's a lot of static between many disparate audiences that each liked different elements for different reasons, and feel like this new game is either an exciting new direction or a complete failure. I personally feel like the horror element seems to be pretty much gone. But I wasn't ever scared of Dead Space, to be quite honest. I thought it was fraught with cheap jump scares, and the lore underneath was what made the game interesting to me. "Go through the bowels of a dirty ship where goofy looking corpse monsters jump out, and some of them have bulletproof pants" was never going to scare or compel me. But "alien artifact is generating hallucinations of your girlfriend to manipulate you into helping it get off a space ship" was very sci-fi and worked for me. I honestly think the more they move away from horror, the better the games will be for it. The horror elements were often very intrusive. Take the daycare in DS2. That could have been a "look how awful it is that these children died. This is really sad." Instead it was "attack of the demon babies! EXTREEEEEMEEEE!!!" When I hear, "this game is no longer attempting to be scary like the first two," for me, that's an improvement.

 

[Sargonas42]

Saying it is "not from the same franchise at all" is a terribly uninformed and recklessly inflammatory statement with no foundation. You can't say something like that when it so clearly is not true, because the only thing I can assume is that you are trying to troll us.

Then it's a troll army. I've heard nothing but "this game doesn't really fit the franchise in terms of tone." I mean, everyone. And saying "this game is no longer about claustrophobic horror" isn't a plus or a minus. Games need to have the space to breathe and change in my opinion. Otherwise it's just, "now Isaac's running around an even bigger ship! There's vents EVERYWHERE!!!!" saturation. It's reasonable to think that the Isaac of the first Dead Space can't truly be believably reproduced. He's not just a guy in a bad situation anymore. He's a hardened survivor. Which means that the third game has to depart from the franchise's initial offering.

Everyone needs to decide what they want from Dead Space for themselves. There's a lot of static between many disparate audiences that each liked different elements for different reasons, and feel like this new game is either an exciting new direction or a complete failure. I personally feel like the horror element seems to be pretty much gone. But I wasn't ever scared of Dead Space, to be quite honest. I thought it was fraught with cheap jump scares, and the lore underneath was what made the game interesting to me. "Go through the bowels of a dirty ship where goofy looking corpse monsters jump out, and some of them have bulletproof pants" was never going to scare or compel me. But "alien artifact is generating hallucinations of your girlfriend to manipulate you into helping it get off a space ship" was very sci-fi and worked for me. I honestly think the more they move away from horror, the better the games will be for it. The horror elements were often very intrusive. Take the daycare in DS2. That could have been a "look how awful it is that these children died. This is really sad." Instead it was "attack of the demon babies! EXTREEEEEMEEEE!!!" When I hear, "this game is no longer attempting to be scary like the first two," for me, that's an improvement.

I won't argue in that it is definitely a DIFFERENT game from 1, by far. But that's what a trilogy does. The story goes on, the characters develop and evolve, the situations moves forward in some way and you get the classic story arc. I won't argue it has evolved, (and I feel for the better. 1 was *amazing* but we can't have more of the same, the evolution is healthy) but just because of that you can't say its "not from the same franchise at all" like he did and be taken seriously. Your way of wording it though is much more thought out and supportable.

 

[TaboriHK]

I won't argue in that it is definitely a DIFFERENT game from 1, by far. But that's what a trilogy does. The story goes on, the characters develop and evolve, the situations moves forward in some way and you get the classic story arc. I won't argue it has evolved, (and I feel for the better. 1 was *amazing* but we can't have more of the same, the evolution is healthy) but just because of that you can't say its "not from the same franchise at all" like he did and be taken seriously. Your way of wording it though is much more thought out and supportable.

I could be wrong, I just took his comment as hyperbole and not necessarily literal.