Caution: This review is lengthy, rambling, and contains strong language.
Yes, I know I'm a little late on the bandwagon, but I'm getting to these games as I go! I can only play one Xbox at a time.
Dead Space was an interesting title to me ever since I first saw the teaser trailer featuring the most horrifying version of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" I've ever heard. Being a fan of the Survival Horror genre ever since Resident Evil and Silent Hill, I thought that a next-gen survival horror game set in space was probably the most awesome thing ever, because the only way you can actually improve upon slavering mutants and brain-hungry zombies is to put them in space. Claustrophobia can go a long way toward making you feel isolated and alone and all the more threatened by the creatures seeking to feast on your delicious brain stem. Ventilation systems and water transportation ducts and all manner of narrow corridors can give your enemy ample opportunity to sneak up on you, forcing you to be constantly aware of your surroundings and never take your eyes away from that open fan intake on the wall over there...
Unfortunately, Dead Space uses none of these things to create a survival horror game. This title, though a competent romp through the outskirts of horror but mostly clinging to action, is little more than a skip down memory lane to all the things we've seen before. It almost makes a point to seem cliche and full of what I like to call contrived bullshit. This isn't to say the game isn't completely worth attention, but it also screams "danger, Will Robinson!" if you come expecting it to throw some new punches in a fairly worn-out fight. Be warned that all these things have probably been said already by people more eloquent than I.
So Bounce a Graviton Particle Beam Off the Main Deflector Dish
Getting into the meat and potatoes of this title takes all of about five minutes, and from there, the meat and potatoes don't stop flowing. You, Isaac Clarke the mute Engineer, and the rest of your little crew crash-land on the Ishimura, a giant planet-cracking mining vessel that dropped off the communications grid. Immediately, the female in your group loses her goddamn mind before anything remotely terrifying begins, setting the pace for the rest of the game. You are the only competent human being aboard this derelict nightmare, and it's up to you to save the day. Luckily for you, if you've played any semblance of action title before, this isn't as hard as it sounds.
Dead Space is, as has already been mentioned many times over, a decent action platform. Its controls for the Xbox 360 are laid out nicely, easy to manage, and hard to mess up. As a third-person over-the-shoulder game, much like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, you generally have a "running around" set of controls and an "aiming" set of controls that translate well between one another, rarely getting in the way or confusing the player as to what-button-does-what. The buttons serve you admirably in almost every situation from moving about in zero-gravity to blasting the limbs off of a ravenous Necromorph. Although there are some extremely annoy niggles in the control scheme, they're definitely easier to acclimate to than the vacuum of space.
Even as you set foot into the first elevator, fleeing for your life from something vicious and spine-hungry, you're told one of the game's key points - cut off their limbs. Assuming that every single one of us has been beaten over the head with the knowledge that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain or sever the head, the game makes sure to tell you about its unique and innovative limb-removal combat about fourteen times before you even pick up your first weapon. You're then violently introduced to the combat system itself. Armed with a plasma cutter, a device hitherto used for mining and shipboard repair, you are forced to take on your first Necromorph, and all the beauty and flaws of destroying an alien life form become rapidly apparent. Although your controls allow you to accurately pinpoint enemy bits and pieces, your perspective gives you a great field of view of the battlefield, and your very-well-reinforced advice on how to take down Necromorphs arms you with knowledge, you'll probably find the whole ranged-versus-melee aspect wanting for something it needs: a dodge feature. Isaac is no nimble acrobat, to be sure, but most of the enemies you'll be playing with throughout the game are, in fact, melee-based combatants. While aiming you can only move so quickly, you cannot run, and it takes a moment for you to actually raise or lower weapons - a moment that will often cost you a health bar. You do have a melee attack function, but you might as well be opening your arms wide and breaking into song, because the monsters don't care that you have a melee attack - theirs are better than yours. In close-quarters or with more than a few enemies to worry about, I'm sure the lack of a "GET THE FUCK OUT" button is something that'll annoy more than just me.
One of Dead Space's most interesting features, I think, is its "HUDless" HUD. This choice in design initially had me a bit leery, but several games have fooled with it before - HALO's assault rifle showing you its ammo information on the rifle's display screen, for instance, was done long before Dead Space decided to remove most if not all elements of immersion-breaking fourth-wall display. Instead, everything you need is cleverly located on Isaac's suit or guns, or projected there from. This really leads me to wonder what the point of having your vital statistics displayed on your back is, or how exactly it benefits Isaac to have his remaining Kinesis energy display on his right shoulder, but I digress. I suggest playing this on a somewhat high-resolution television, since the text in your inventory screen can get rather tiny. Otherwise, you'll be spending some extra time leaning forward in the chair.
Dead Space combines the HUDless system with a kind of shop system that recalls Dino Crisis 2, which if anyone bothered to play was an action-shooter third-person-with-fixed-camera-angles adventure following on the heels of its survival horror predecessor. You collect Credits and things called Power Nodes throughout the game and can use these items to buy new gear or upgrade existing gear, respectively. The store offers all of your weaponry, ammo, medkits, air, Kinesis refills, and pretty much anything else you'll ever need, assuming you can find the schematics for said items. Luckily most of the schematics sit in the middle of brightly-lit, monster-free hallways directly in the path of the plot, so you'd have to be blind or stupid (or possibly both) to miss out on the really important ones. Even your suit receives upgrades at these stores, but that only boosts your inventory slots and helps reduce the damage you take from enemies. In order to actually improve things like your HP, individual weapon damage, and ammo capacity, you need to find these relatively rare things called power nodes, which Isaac can then use at a workbench to improve individual statistics on a grid-like "level up" network reminiscent of Final Fantasy X. Fortunately for you, power nodes are available through the shop whenever you're really hurting for those last two or three, but they're a bit pricey - until you reach the midgame where credits are falling out of the juicy remnants of your enemies.
The Contrived Bullshit
For all the praise I can give Dead Space for being relatively well-done, I can very easily pick out things that infuriate me as a gamer. It's rife with the same kind of questions you ask the heroine in a horror movie, which despite being annoying are really part of the "horror experience." More jarring are the segments in the game that seem to be designed with only one purpose: being cliche. I'm not going to claim whether or not this is a bad thing or argue about how a game can truly expect to be original in this day and age of dime-a-dozen copy-paste jobs, but I can tell you that a lot of it seems to be an attempt at pissing in the player's eyes.
First of all, the game's combat system is full of irritating things that make me want to stab the developers' throats with a pen. As I stated before, the game lacks a dodge feature to help you in the many situations that monsters will simply drop down on you and proceed with the nomming of delicious engineer face. You could certainly argue that it's because Isaac is far from agile in his engineering rig with his heavy magnetic boots, but I'd just like to ask: why the fuck isn't there a goddamn dodge feature?! Your melee function is about as effective as Captain Planet fighting pollution in Los Angeles. It literally just annoys the monsters, and it also takes quite some time to recover from - infinitely less time than the monster you just slapped the shit out of, mind you.
Instead of challenging the player with intelligent AI or particularly cunning encounters, Dead Space seems intent on just slaughtering you with archetypes. There's the "Jason Voorhees" slasher enemy, the "Expectorating Horror" spitter enemy, the "Jihad ************" suicide-bomber, and the "Kiss Me, I'm Cthulhu" leaper-type enemy. Minibosses such as the "Fallapart Man" enemy - which devolves into smaller enemies when killed - and the "Crouching Armor, Hidden Weakpoint" tank monster provide a tiny bit of variety. None of these enemies are particularly difficult until you reach the point in the game that introduces their "dark" variety, which is exactly what it sounds like. The enemies literally get darker in color and power up halfway through the game for no reason whatsoever. They don't even try to justify this by claiming the monsters were exposed to gamma rays or space juice, they just...got darker and harder to kill. The same tactics work against all their forms with one exception - darker enemies require more ammo to take down. You still shoot the same spots to kill a "dark" slicer, it's just that his legs take three plasma bolts to cut off.
The game sometimes takes liberty with bullshitting your encounters with various enemies so that it can provide a "challenge," or at least what I assume it wants to be a challenge. When boarding an elevator, make sure you don't walk away for the requisite elevator ride, because you can bet your bottom dollar that an enemy may just drop down from the ceiling and require you to fight it in hand-to-hand combat, where you are without hand-to-hand combat options and it is a whirlwind of face-raping hacksaws. Then four more drop in once he's dead. Good luck! Also, why on earth does removing the wall-mounted power cell you need for an elevator require you to walk back through a previously-clear hallway that is now full of fire-immune spitting monstrosities and gouts of flame coming out of the wall? Are the wall-mounted flamethrowers on the same circuit as that elevator? Puzzle encounters like these will haunt you throughout the entire game and are often littered with regular enemies, just in case you thought you were dealing with something that you could actually take time and apply your brain to. And why the hell does Isaac have to blow up every puzzle to complete it? Isn't he an engineer? What kind of catastrophic damage has he caused to a multi-billion dollar spaceship just trying to open a goddamn door? There are more instances where you literally just have to blow a door lock off than doors you need to locate keys for. While I'm sure it's calling back to those days in Resident Evil when a door would stubbornly refuse to let you through until you obtained the Sword Key despite the massive ordinance your characters were carrying, Dead Space has you detonate critical systems at the drop of a hat to pick up some ammo. Can't Isaac just flip out a multitool and jury-rig the system to overload and trip a breaker? What about snip a wire? Apparently, this was the much less manly route and was turned down in favor of more explosions.
Speaking of ammo, the game really misses the point of survival horror. Ammo and credits are plentiful even on the more difficult settings as long as you know what you're doing. The game's store system allows you to stock up on nigh-infinite amounts of medkits and ammo so long as you can pay for it, as well as the all-important Power Nodes that you need to upgrade your equipment. It's extremely easy to get a fully-upgraded weapon when you can just blow a ton of money on the nodes you need to beef them up, to the point that the Plasma Cutter you get at the beginning of the game is the only weapon you really need - its good damage, range, firing speed, capacity, and plentiful ammo supply mean that almost every enemy is at your mercy. It can even rotate to fire its energy blade vertically or horizontally for maximum "Cut Off Their Limbs" action! Every other weapon in the game is so incredibly situational that it's almost a waste of money to buy them, let alone the waste of ammo it is to fire one. The Line Gun is a permanently-horizontal, wide-beam Plasma Cutter that will deal less damage than its little cousin until you get it fully upgraded, although its secondary fire plants a timed mine that can devastate close-together targets. The Ripper, though good at dismembering regular versions of most enemies, is tricky to judge and deals so little damage per shot that it's effectively worthless against the stronger "dark" creatures later in the game. The Plasma Rifle is truly the only other gun worth mentioning, since it has a high rate of fire, a huge capacity, and good damage. What it lacks in "severing" ability it makes up for in punch, helping you put down most creatures by juggling them on its rapid-fire bullets before they close in to melee.
Wrapping Things Up In Bloodstained Blankets
Really, I could go on for hours about the head-desk instances Dead Space seems to have had wedged into it with power tool assistance, but for all its flaws and things that make me clutch the controller in frustration, Dead Space is fun. If you're into good third-person shooters with some momentary startles, pretty space vistas, and good old-fashioned Nightmare Fuel, this one will give you an enjoyable romp through a next-gen action title. Unfortunately, that makes it sound like a niche title that would only appeal to fans of either horror or action, and the sad part is, despite expectation, that's the only market I can really recommend it to; that, or if you've never played a survival horror game in your life and came across the game at a friend's house without any expectations. I really wanted to like Dead Space and name it game of the year 2008 for me, but it's probably closer to "game I wish I waited to come to the bargain bin."
Yes, I know I'm a little late on the bandwagon, but I'm getting to these games as I go! I can only play one Xbox at a time.
Dead Space was an interesting title to me ever since I first saw the teaser trailer featuring the most horrifying version of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" I've ever heard. Being a fan of the Survival Horror genre ever since Resident Evil and Silent Hill, I thought that a next-gen survival horror game set in space was probably the most awesome thing ever, because the only way you can actually improve upon slavering mutants and brain-hungry zombies is to put them in space. Claustrophobia can go a long way toward making you feel isolated and alone and all the more threatened by the creatures seeking to feast on your delicious brain stem. Ventilation systems and water transportation ducts and all manner of narrow corridors can give your enemy ample opportunity to sneak up on you, forcing you to be constantly aware of your surroundings and never take your eyes away from that open fan intake on the wall over there...
Unfortunately, Dead Space uses none of these things to create a survival horror game. This title, though a competent romp through the outskirts of horror but mostly clinging to action, is little more than a skip down memory lane to all the things we've seen before. It almost makes a point to seem cliche and full of what I like to call contrived bullshit. This isn't to say the game isn't completely worth attention, but it also screams "danger, Will Robinson!" if you come expecting it to throw some new punches in a fairly worn-out fight. Be warned that all these things have probably been said already by people more eloquent than I.
So Bounce a Graviton Particle Beam Off the Main Deflector Dish
Getting into the meat and potatoes of this title takes all of about five minutes, and from there, the meat and potatoes don't stop flowing. You, Isaac Clarke the mute Engineer, and the rest of your little crew crash-land on the Ishimura, a giant planet-cracking mining vessel that dropped off the communications grid. Immediately, the female in your group loses her goddamn mind before anything remotely terrifying begins, setting the pace for the rest of the game. You are the only competent human being aboard this derelict nightmare, and it's up to you to save the day. Luckily for you, if you've played any semblance of action title before, this isn't as hard as it sounds.
Dead Space is, as has already been mentioned many times over, a decent action platform. Its controls for the Xbox 360 are laid out nicely, easy to manage, and hard to mess up. As a third-person over-the-shoulder game, much like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, you generally have a "running around" set of controls and an "aiming" set of controls that translate well between one another, rarely getting in the way or confusing the player as to what-button-does-what. The buttons serve you admirably in almost every situation from moving about in zero-gravity to blasting the limbs off of a ravenous Necromorph. Although there are some extremely annoy niggles in the control scheme, they're definitely easier to acclimate to than the vacuum of space.
Even as you set foot into the first elevator, fleeing for your life from something vicious and spine-hungry, you're told one of the game's key points - cut off their limbs. Assuming that every single one of us has been beaten over the head with the knowledge that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain or sever the head, the game makes sure to tell you about its unique and innovative limb-removal combat about fourteen times before you even pick up your first weapon. You're then violently introduced to the combat system itself. Armed with a plasma cutter, a device hitherto used for mining and shipboard repair, you are forced to take on your first Necromorph, and all the beauty and flaws of destroying an alien life form become rapidly apparent. Although your controls allow you to accurately pinpoint enemy bits and pieces, your perspective gives you a great field of view of the battlefield, and your very-well-reinforced advice on how to take down Necromorphs arms you with knowledge, you'll probably find the whole ranged-versus-melee aspect wanting for something it needs: a dodge feature. Isaac is no nimble acrobat, to be sure, but most of the enemies you'll be playing with throughout the game are, in fact, melee-based combatants. While aiming you can only move so quickly, you cannot run, and it takes a moment for you to actually raise or lower weapons - a moment that will often cost you a health bar. You do have a melee attack function, but you might as well be opening your arms wide and breaking into song, because the monsters don't care that you have a melee attack - theirs are better than yours. In close-quarters or with more than a few enemies to worry about, I'm sure the lack of a "GET THE FUCK OUT" button is something that'll annoy more than just me.
One of Dead Space's most interesting features, I think, is its "HUDless" HUD. This choice in design initially had me a bit leery, but several games have fooled with it before - HALO's assault rifle showing you its ammo information on the rifle's display screen, for instance, was done long before Dead Space decided to remove most if not all elements of immersion-breaking fourth-wall display. Instead, everything you need is cleverly located on Isaac's suit or guns, or projected there from. This really leads me to wonder what the point of having your vital statistics displayed on your back is, or how exactly it benefits Isaac to have his remaining Kinesis energy display on his right shoulder, but I digress. I suggest playing this on a somewhat high-resolution television, since the text in your inventory screen can get rather tiny. Otherwise, you'll be spending some extra time leaning forward in the chair.
Dead Space combines the HUDless system with a kind of shop system that recalls Dino Crisis 2, which if anyone bothered to play was an action-shooter third-person-with-fixed-camera-angles adventure following on the heels of its survival horror predecessor. You collect Credits and things called Power Nodes throughout the game and can use these items to buy new gear or upgrade existing gear, respectively. The store offers all of your weaponry, ammo, medkits, air, Kinesis refills, and pretty much anything else you'll ever need, assuming you can find the schematics for said items. Luckily most of the schematics sit in the middle of brightly-lit, monster-free hallways directly in the path of the plot, so you'd have to be blind or stupid (or possibly both) to miss out on the really important ones. Even your suit receives upgrades at these stores, but that only boosts your inventory slots and helps reduce the damage you take from enemies. In order to actually improve things like your HP, individual weapon damage, and ammo capacity, you need to find these relatively rare things called power nodes, which Isaac can then use at a workbench to improve individual statistics on a grid-like "level up" network reminiscent of Final Fantasy X. Fortunately for you, power nodes are available through the shop whenever you're really hurting for those last two or three, but they're a bit pricey - until you reach the midgame where credits are falling out of the juicy remnants of your enemies.
The Contrived Bullshit
For all the praise I can give Dead Space for being relatively well-done, I can very easily pick out things that infuriate me as a gamer. It's rife with the same kind of questions you ask the heroine in a horror movie, which despite being annoying are really part of the "horror experience." More jarring are the segments in the game that seem to be designed with only one purpose: being cliche. I'm not going to claim whether or not this is a bad thing or argue about how a game can truly expect to be original in this day and age of dime-a-dozen copy-paste jobs, but I can tell you that a lot of it seems to be an attempt at pissing in the player's eyes.
First of all, the game's combat system is full of irritating things that make me want to stab the developers' throats with a pen. As I stated before, the game lacks a dodge feature to help you in the many situations that monsters will simply drop down on you and proceed with the nomming of delicious engineer face. You could certainly argue that it's because Isaac is far from agile in his engineering rig with his heavy magnetic boots, but I'd just like to ask: why the fuck isn't there a goddamn dodge feature?! Your melee function is about as effective as Captain Planet fighting pollution in Los Angeles. It literally just annoys the monsters, and it also takes quite some time to recover from - infinitely less time than the monster you just slapped the shit out of, mind you.
Instead of challenging the player with intelligent AI or particularly cunning encounters, Dead Space seems intent on just slaughtering you with archetypes. There's the "Jason Voorhees" slasher enemy, the "Expectorating Horror" spitter enemy, the "Jihad ************" suicide-bomber, and the "Kiss Me, I'm Cthulhu" leaper-type enemy. Minibosses such as the "Fallapart Man" enemy - which devolves into smaller enemies when killed - and the "Crouching Armor, Hidden Weakpoint" tank monster provide a tiny bit of variety. None of these enemies are particularly difficult until you reach the point in the game that introduces their "dark" variety, which is exactly what it sounds like. The enemies literally get darker in color and power up halfway through the game for no reason whatsoever. They don't even try to justify this by claiming the monsters were exposed to gamma rays or space juice, they just...got darker and harder to kill. The same tactics work against all their forms with one exception - darker enemies require more ammo to take down. You still shoot the same spots to kill a "dark" slicer, it's just that his legs take three plasma bolts to cut off.
The game sometimes takes liberty with bullshitting your encounters with various enemies so that it can provide a "challenge," or at least what I assume it wants to be a challenge. When boarding an elevator, make sure you don't walk away for the requisite elevator ride, because you can bet your bottom dollar that an enemy may just drop down from the ceiling and require you to fight it in hand-to-hand combat, where you are without hand-to-hand combat options and it is a whirlwind of face-raping hacksaws. Then four more drop in once he's dead. Good luck! Also, why on earth does removing the wall-mounted power cell you need for an elevator require you to walk back through a previously-clear hallway that is now full of fire-immune spitting monstrosities and gouts of flame coming out of the wall? Are the wall-mounted flamethrowers on the same circuit as that elevator? Puzzle encounters like these will haunt you throughout the entire game and are often littered with regular enemies, just in case you thought you were dealing with something that you could actually take time and apply your brain to. And why the hell does Isaac have to blow up every puzzle to complete it? Isn't he an engineer? What kind of catastrophic damage has he caused to a multi-billion dollar spaceship just trying to open a goddamn door? There are more instances where you literally just have to blow a door lock off than doors you need to locate keys for. While I'm sure it's calling back to those days in Resident Evil when a door would stubbornly refuse to let you through until you obtained the Sword Key despite the massive ordinance your characters were carrying, Dead Space has you detonate critical systems at the drop of a hat to pick up some ammo. Can't Isaac just flip out a multitool and jury-rig the system to overload and trip a breaker? What about snip a wire? Apparently, this was the much less manly route and was turned down in favor of more explosions.
Speaking of ammo, the game really misses the point of survival horror. Ammo and credits are plentiful even on the more difficult settings as long as you know what you're doing. The game's store system allows you to stock up on nigh-infinite amounts of medkits and ammo so long as you can pay for it, as well as the all-important Power Nodes that you need to upgrade your equipment. It's extremely easy to get a fully-upgraded weapon when you can just blow a ton of money on the nodes you need to beef them up, to the point that the Plasma Cutter you get at the beginning of the game is the only weapon you really need - its good damage, range, firing speed, capacity, and plentiful ammo supply mean that almost every enemy is at your mercy. It can even rotate to fire its energy blade vertically or horizontally for maximum "Cut Off Their Limbs" action! Every other weapon in the game is so incredibly situational that it's almost a waste of money to buy them, let alone the waste of ammo it is to fire one. The Line Gun is a permanently-horizontal, wide-beam Plasma Cutter that will deal less damage than its little cousin until you get it fully upgraded, although its secondary fire plants a timed mine that can devastate close-together targets. The Ripper, though good at dismembering regular versions of most enemies, is tricky to judge and deals so little damage per shot that it's effectively worthless against the stronger "dark" creatures later in the game. The Plasma Rifle is truly the only other gun worth mentioning, since it has a high rate of fire, a huge capacity, and good damage. What it lacks in "severing" ability it makes up for in punch, helping you put down most creatures by juggling them on its rapid-fire bullets before they close in to melee.
Wrapping Things Up In Bloodstained Blankets
Really, I could go on for hours about the head-desk instances Dead Space seems to have had wedged into it with power tool assistance, but for all its flaws and things that make me clutch the controller in frustration, Dead Space is fun. If you're into good third-person shooters with some momentary startles, pretty space vistas, and good old-fashioned Nightmare Fuel, this one will give you an enjoyable romp through a next-gen action title. Unfortunately, that makes it sound like a niche title that would only appeal to fans of either horror or action, and the sad part is, despite expectation, that's the only market I can really recommend it to; that, or if you've never played a survival horror game in your life and came across the game at a friend's house without any expectations. I really wanted to like Dead Space and name it game of the year 2008 for me, but it's probably closer to "game I wish I waited to come to the bargain bin."
