Dead Space

"An amazing game with plenty of er... Dead Space."

Graphics:

This game is a complete mix of brilliant graphics, and muddy ugly textures and effects. Your first time playing, being hit with the light from a nearby star and seeing the Ishimura is a stunning sight. You'll be impressed by the mouth animations and the smoothness of it all. And then later on, you'll start seeing some /terrible/ smoke and decompression effects and bland gore. Let me break it down into segments. The lighting is fantastic and the best part of the game. The Ishimura is littered with lighting to keep its thousands of crew workers out of the dark. And every light casts shadows and brilliant patterns at some points in the game. Before you know it, you'll be depending on the light for a while. If the lights go out completely you'll painic and wave your flash light left and right, seeing what else is afraid of the dark. One cannot say too much about lighting and shadows in text, so I'll wrap this up. Its some of the best lighting effects this side of STALKER.


And when illuminated by this great light-work, you'll be looking at the top right shoulder of Issac through the game. This camera style was also present in Resident Evil 4. I liked it there, and liked it even more here. Its refined and very smooth. During a fight its incredibly easy to spin the camera around to look over his left should and see whats behind you. However, while aiming, the camera freezes and for PC users the mouse response time is just awful. The most crippling part of this game. But the camera works and so does the HUD system. Accessing your inventory brings up a hologram in real time that floats in front of Issac. Your HP, ammo, and air supply is built into your suit. for a long time I've hated over-charismatic HUD systems and this game is exactly what the doctor ordered.


Its a shame the animations are a bit stiff in this game. Issac runs around as if he's wearing normal clothes, not a huge engineer suit .The other characters you encounter move with hunched backs and its all pretty awkward.

Sound:

The sound effects in a horror game make or break the atmosphere. This can be said for a lot of them for the past ten years. Dead Space delivers a conventional sound scape to scare you, but it succeeds in bringing the same tension System Shock 2 had. As you venture around the ship you'll hear the crashes and screams of survivors being found, the monsters in the vents, the groans and machinery of the ship and so on. One mark I have to give is the over-use of the jump scare in this game. Way, way too many times a loud and sharp scream or noise will appear out of thin air and silence designed to scare you but it just detracts from the immersion.

Many makeshift weapons are available in Dead Space and all have them pack quite a punch although there isn't much variation as almost all of the weapons let off a loud concussion or blast. Overall though I enjoyed the sound of the guns and the ambient noises. An Aliens-esque atmosphere was never dropped but it worked well. Not really scary per say, but it was immersive and kept you engaged. As for one last note, the voice acting in this game is quite good beyond for the Kendra character. Everyone else delivers believable lines and tones and won't throw your suspension of disbelief out the window. Last mark in the sound department to give: Your character is a silent hero. This really ticked me off, he's supposed to be a nobody--The extension of the "player" personality. However even when approached from unearthly horrors he doesn't let out one yelp or word.



Story:

The Ishimura, a capital sized "Planet Cracker", goes silent after a routine planet crack. A repair crew including you- Issac Clarke- is sent into investigate. Almost instantly you can tell things went very, very wrong for the Ishimura. This game was promoted to have a fantastic plot but because of the small cast its apparent almost instantly who friend or foe is. And since Issac is completely silent throughout the game the fact he is said to be a "simple engineer" becomes unbelievable because he apparently has nerves of steel. The fact he never even screams at some points is just plain stupid.


See this is just a generic Sci-Fi plot (Cough EXACTLY like Event Horizon cough). You'll see aliens, plot twists visible from a mile away and more aliens. The love sub plot we get is useless because our engineer never speaks and it seems to be ripped off directly from the old Ps2 game Run Like Hell. "Ship/colony gets overrun by something, crew sent in, goes bad from worse someone is in on it." We've seen this a million times and it was only good once. The good marks I have to give are for the audio and text logs through out the game. They are extremely convincing, and its possible to read pages of writing written in blood on the walls from the once alive passengers. There situation is made realistic through their development of the logs and writing and how they fought. "Cut off their limbs" was the first revolution and one can almost imagine the sick joy they got at discovering that. Then they discovered the vents, to not talk, and even makeshift battle maps can be scattered around and one of them has every crew sector X'd off in blood. Its chilling. There was a lot of life in this ship and I love it. Its almost like human life was here only minutes ago, and they did react how you and I would.


Summary: While having a cookie cutter plot, the game manages to keep tension up with writing and audio within the ship. This still doesn't help the fact the supporting cast sucks and so do the "twists". The religious sub plot, while minorly interesting, seems like a pretty huge cop out too. 6/10


Game play: When I got into this game I wasn't expecting the combat to work. The whole limb deal and how the guns are makeshift sounded pretty stupid. Luckily almost all of my assumptions were met with positives. The camera works fluidly in combat, blowing off limbs is satisfying and the amount of guns is just enough. Lets talk about the combat first.


When you encounter an enemy you have to hold down Mouse 2 and than a directional laser acts as your aiming assistant. Using the plasma cutter as an example, you can change it from a horizontal or vertical shot. Horiztonal shots at knees cut off legs quickly, vertical on shoulders chops off limbs. Its gruesome and a fun gaming mechanic, but gets old quickly. For almost every enemy you just shoot off a leg than the arms, and it dies. But the assortment of enemies makes up for this. Some of the creatures are just sick. There's one that was once a newborn, now it has tentacles and crawls on walls and ceilings, shooting bone-y spikes at you. Another that has two front legs and a tail, like a reverse Licker from Resident Evil. There's about 10 more enemies than that. And to blow away these distorted and creepy creatures, you get around six weapons. One that launches circular saws, one that sends a pulse of energy to cut things in half, and a generic pulse rifle ala Aliens. Most of the game is a hallway crawl where you go into back rooms to find ammo, logs and other goodies. You can hold Ctrl for Issac to put a beam of light on the floor that leads you to your next objective. "Battle" moments are easy to predict, like when you complete an objective or pull a lever. This is the weakest part of the game. Clearing out hall way to hall way, room to room... its pretty boring. Some variety is thrown in with zero G and zero O2 rooms but those proved to just be annoying.


Summary: The guns are neat, the enemies are great, the game is boring after more than a couple hours. There's a lot of bloated levels and overblown sections where you crawl around the outside of the ship and one where you shoot a meteor monster off the side of the ship like a bug on the windshield. Plenty of room for improvement, and a sequel. 6/10


Replay value:

You can keep your weapons and armor and get unlockable equipment if you beat the game and replay on the same difficulty. I did play three times to get all the goodies, but after that... you won't be playing it again.

Final:

In my opinion this game is an entirely mixed bag. It has some cool story elements, and terrible characters. Neat guns and enemies, and boring repetetive levels. I'm not convinced this universe can work outside of brown and white halls of metal. If there is to be a sequel, I want a speaking character, and more environments and gameplay elements.








Misc: This game was a mess to read, and was formatted poorly. Minor update fixing grammar, I bolded the text for all categories and spaced it out. Final Update. 9/3/09

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/08/09, Updated 10/28/09

Game Release: Dead Space (US, 10/20/08)