Dead Space

"The first genuinely good survival horror game of the new console generation."

Dead Space is the latest addition to the survival horror genre, one that is replete with truly brilliant games, but which has been rather lacking as of late. Dead Space marks a return to the classic trademarks of the survival horror genre in tense gaming, an incredibly immersive world, a compelling storyline, and being genuinely scary.

Graphics, performance, and presentation: 10/10

Dead Space's graphics are very good, considerably better than most games on the 360 right now, and excellent graphics are vital for the sense of immersion horror thrives on. Objects are crisp, lines are clean, colours aren't exaggerated or underplayed, and the lighting is really well done. The performance is strong at all times, even in scenes with masses of objects to track and animate, and in multiple playthroughs I've yet to notice distinct slowdown or choppiness. Animations are smooth and flow well, and are generally remarkably believable given the subject matter, particularly the Necromorph's changing movement styles as you dismember them. Particularly notable is the attention to detail; as you enter a zero-gravity section all the weight comes off of Isaac's arms and they ride higher and the style of his walk changes subtly from walking against the ground to walking with it. This incredible attention to detail makes the game incredibly immersive. The world built here is genuinely believable, with every element of the USG Ishimura and the objects on board looking stark, efficient, and industrial; that is, until you start seeing where the Necromorph infestation has taken over. There are bloody sigils and messages scrawled over the walls from survivors, and where the infestation has spread it looks chillingly organic. As an exercise in worldbuilding, Dead Space is a spectacular success, and this serves to create much of the spectacularly immersive quality of the game. The cutscenes and 'video logs' are well managed and animated as well, and this, with the extreme fluidity of the in-game animations, combines to make Dead Space a remarkably cinematic experience.

Sound, music, and voices: 10/10

Sound is a crucial element in creating the immersion and tension vital to good horror, and Dead Space's sound is truly brilliant. This is, in all honesty, the most effective use of sound in a new-generation console game I have heard. You owe it to yourself to feed it through a serious speaker setup, preferably with surround sound, or you're missing out on what makes Dead Space genuinely exceptional. The reactive sounds the world makes are all believable and feel real, whether it be the thumping of magnetic boots on metal walls, the squelching sounds as you walk through infected areas of the hull, the screeching of the Necromorphs, or the sinister whine of the Ripper. The game uses sound to create atmosphere brilliantly, with the creaks and groans of a massive ship constantly in the background, and the paranoia-inducing sounds of Necromorphs in the vents, or in the roof above you, or under the treads beneath your feet. The latter is used with excellent timing, neither so little that it fails to build tension effectively, nor so often that the player becomes used to it. Every time you hear the skittering of a Necromorph running over your head, you will jump. There are also parts of the game where the ship makes noises that are in and of themselves so disturbing that, despite the complete lack of foes in the area, they're still some of the most paranoia-inducing parts of the game. But by far the most inventive use of sound is when you enter a part of the ship in vacuum, and everything just goes dead. All you can hear are the muted sounds of clangs transferred through the decking into your suit, the sounds made by objects striking your suit, the muted thud of your weapons firing, and Isaac breathing. It adds an entirely new dimension to the game, and a new reason to be afraid. Before, the shrieks of attacking Necromorphs got to you, now it's that they make no sound at all.

Speaking of Isaac, the voice acting in this game is competent, and Isaac's lack of speech is no impediment. Not once during the game does he speak, but unlike Gordon Freeman, we can hear him being attacked all too well. It really adds to the terror of death in the game when you can hear Isaac's pained gasps every time he gets hurt, and the screams he makes as he dies are chilling. They will get to you, especially the agonised howls me makes when burned to death or flung off the ship into open space. Most unpleasant of all is the aforementioned breathing in vacuum, where as your oxygen meter dwindles, Isaac will breathe more and more shallowly, gasping for air, and when this is all you can hear it's damn creepy. When you run out, Isaac gasps and gargles so unpleasantly as he asphyxiates that it marks the second time in my life that a game has done something so disturbing I had to turn it off.

The music isn't music, per se, except for small sections of the game where the music is in-world. What it is, however, is a constant backing to the game, escalating, slowing, and disappearing as more or less enemies are on the screen, and the game constantly uses orchestral stings to emphasise every single unpleasant point, ranging from short chords for small appearances, to more drawn-out and extremely dramatic phrases for the big scares and boss fights. The music also disappears altogether when you're in vacuum, providing a distinct contrast.

Story and characters: 10/10

Dead Space, unlike nearly all of the more recent games, has an excellent storyline. It starts off slowly, but a third into the game it really starts to pick up pace. It's a genuinely compelling story, with the hallmarks of all the best examples of sci-fi horror spun together and mixed with Dead Space's own highly conspiratorial and paranoid flavour to make a story of real merit. It's a great story in its own right, especially as it gets close to the end. You will get hit by escalating twist after twist, which range from merely surprising to outright shocking, and the denouement is one of the most savagely brutal twists I've seen recently in any media. The questions of paranoia and sanity it constantly raises are going to keep you thinking about the plot long after it's over, and the ending, which blessedly is NOT a sequel hook, is going to make you demand answers. It's a welcome return to real stories in games instead of excuses for the gameplay to happen, and is on par with some of the better stories in console gaming. It has, like most of the game, a very cinematic feel to it, and like the rest of the game, is designed to really draw you into Isaac's magnetic-treaded boots.

The characters themselves are all well-done, and, remarkably given how little you see of them, feel like actual people with goals and plans rather than just generic NPC facilitators and obfuscators. Isaac Clarke, the game's main character, is characterised well, and manages to pull off the difficult task of being a faceless hero without being a soulless hero. You really do begin to feel for him as a character, especially right near the end.

Some of the story is presented through video, audio and text logs, similar to Bioshock, but most of these are that obvious you can't miss them. However, unless you're really paying attention, you'll miss many details.

Gameplay: 9/10

Dead Space's gameplay really shines, especially in how it keeps you immersed in the game. The UI is completely integrated into the game as holographic images projected by Isaac's suit, with every menu and item designator being projected the same way. Even the cutscenes, with the exception of the intro and outro, are presented either in front of you or as a projected video. It doesn't sound like much, but that nothing follows the camera as it moves so you can even watch a video from behind is spectacularly effective at creating immersion. Even the save-game system is given the same treatment, and an in-game justification. The map is difficult to use, but your ability to trace a line to your next objective with a single button press is incredibly handy while remaining unobtrusive.

The movement feels right. You're an engineer in magnetic boots in a vacuum-capable suit that looks like it weighs a few dozen kilos, and you move correspondingly fast. I don't like the many complaints that Isaac turns very slowly in the game, because people wearing incredibly awkward armour-plated spacesuits tend not to be able to turn right around in less than a second, and since the gameplay is presented form an over-the-shoulder camera, you'd see it happen and it'd break the fantastic immersion. It's also a gameplay choice, making it that much more tense when you hear something behind you with something already in front of you. Zero-gravity sections present more options, now that you can walk on any safe surface, and you will probably get vertigo at least once as you walk in place and the entire room spins around you.

The controls themselves are very intuitively set up, though they're rather different from other shooting games on the 360. At first, you'll probably be trying to melee enemies dozens of metres away, but the control scheme starts to feel completely natural very fast.

The shooting is good, though it isn't as smooth and easy as FPS games tend to be. This is actually a good choice, as easy killing detracts from the feel of tension in combat survival horror lives on. The shoot-to-amputate system is incredibly effective, completely changing the way you think in combat, and adding a great deal more strategy to every decision. You have the ability to lift and throw objects as well as (if you have the charge) slow down time, adding even more choice to the mix, making it very much a thinking game. This is further encouraged by the numerous enemies, each of which works completely different to every other one, from basic running things with claw arms, to freakish wall-huggers that vomit out living turrets, to tiny little bastards that are individually irrelevant but the most dangerous of all in large swarms. You'll need different strategies for every one, and when you have to deal with more than one you really need to think quickly. The bosses, despite being very similar creatures, all work very differently to each other, and are excellent examples of using scale in horror. I particularly like one enemy that's no more dangerous than any other, but that every time you kill it regenerates completely. It's a much more interesting fight than the basic guy you can't hurt to have something that's easy to kill but impossible to keep that way. It also becomes a strategy thing in that you have to balance the time it takes to hurt it with the time gained while it regenerates, and whether or not it's worth the use of limited resources. The tentacle creatures are also scary as hell, especially trying to shoot a small moving target while you're being tossed around like a rag doll. The enemies are also remarkably intelligent, and will play dead to catch you, or use the countless vents to ambush you or sneak up on you. This is the rare horror game in which having your back to the wall is more dangerous, as if a Necromorph comes out of a vent you're directly in front of, it kills you outright.

The guns help out here, each being designed for a specific task, be it killing the small bastards, laying mines, being fantastic up close but useless at range, or good at everything but excelling at nothing. They're refreshingly different from normal shooter guns, as are the enemies, and make for far more strategic play than other games. Design-wise they're also very much made for the game world, all but one being civilian mining or engineering tools adapted to military purposes. The Ripper in particular deserves attention as a much more interesting shotgun substitute. Like the shotgun archetype it needs to fill it excels at close-range and is incredibly inefficient at a distance, but instead of doing a great deal of damage once, it spits out a circular saw blade that does a little damage, but keeps going for about ten seconds. It's much more appropriate for horror, as instead of giving you ultimate power up close it can take everything apart, but takes some time to do it, and the entire time you're sawing there are enemies running towards you.

The game has some interesting puzzles, and it tries to have fewer puzzles but more unique puzzles. That works out well, because you never get that 'not this puzzle again' feeling to it, as even when you're doing the same thing you did before it's in a different way, or to achieve something completely different.

The deaths are well done, which is good given you'll die remarkably often. There are a huge number of death animations, all of them well done and some particularly disturbing, and eventually you'll fear dying not for the bits you'll need to replay, but because the deaths are just unpleasant to watch, particularly asphyxiation, incineration, or 'falling' into space.

Dead Space also stays true to survival horror in having limited resources and few restocking points, and is also rather like Bioshock in its RPG elements, with weapon shops and upgradable weapons but very limited upgrade points, but it is less generous with every resource. However, it isn't stingy enough on the default difficulty, and the result is that, with a few exceptions you never really get too worried about running out. This makes it feel more like action horror than survival horror, which is disappointing given that it does everything else in survival horror so well.

There are common save stations, and if you feel the need you can usually retrace your steps to one if you feel the need, as well as checkpoints before all the sections that are easy to die in. For some, this will make the game seem less scary, since you don't lose as much progress on death.

If you have experience with survival horror games, I thoroughly recommend you play on Hard your first time. Like the Halo series, the default difficulty is the default for more casual gamers, with the hard setting for experiences gamers, and an extra difficult setting meant for people with supreme levels of patience or stubbornness verging on bloodymindedness. It would have been nice had they said this at the start.

Longevity: 8/10

Dead Space is long for modern shooter games, and your first playthrough will probably take you at least 10 and up to 14 hours, with subsequent runs being more in the region of 8-10. It's not a game you play for days before finishing, and frankly, that's a good thing. A game that relies so much on building up enormous levels of tension can't go for much longer than Dead Space does before the player just gets used to it and it's no longer effective.

You'll want to replay it at least once, to get all of the logs, and to see how the story works with hindsight. Fortunately, it's a story that's deep enough to still work on multiple replays, and if you can enjoy twists and revelations after the first time you see them you'll probably get good value out of it. If you like achievements and are a completionist, you'll have to take at least four and probably 5 playthroughs to get them all. Given the quality of the game, I'd recommend buying rather than renting, unless you can't enjoy replaying a story.



The good:

Dead Space's capacity for immersion is second-to-none. Even for a cynical veteran of gaming not being sucked in will be a challenge. It also uses that immersion fantastically, exploiting immersion to create colossal tension, and then using that tension to make the scare moments far more effective. The tension it creates is spectacularly relentless; as every single time you have interactivity within the game you can be killed. You can be attacked while at the shop, while using items, while using the map, while in elevators, while watching video logs, and even while at the save screen. The only times you are genuinely safe is at loading screens, while the game is actively saving, or when you've paused it. This constant tension makes the game far more terrifying to play through in long hauls, as well. Everything in this game works together with the singular goal of making the Ishimura the most stressful place you can be. They also use the environment to create paranoia, with the Necromorphs being able to use the vents that are everywhere, and these aren't scripted. They can happen at any time, and will. There's one door near the start that slams shut as you go to approach it, and even though I don't think it happens again, you'll still think twice about entering every single similar door for the rest of the game.

The bad:

As spectacularly as Dead Space piles on the tension, it sometimes doesn't use it that well. Tension alone is not quite the same as horror, and the middle of the game is much more tense than horrific. They could have learned from the FEAR games exactly how to exploit the tension they've built up, because there they use it masterfully, playing your paranoia like an instrument. I do admit, though, that if they had, the game would probably be so terrifying as to be commercially unviable.

They also let themselves down with one specific boss. When you have a massive boss, you need to have a scale-giving shot to show just how preposterously huge it actually is or it's not as scary as it could be. Strangely, they fail in the second of three huge bosses, making the failure even more inexplicable.

The ugly:

The overallocation of resources is very disappointing, especially in a game that does every other element of survival horror so masterfully. This is only a problem if you expect a real challenge on the default difficulty, as on hard resources are much scarcer and on impossible they're very close to absent entirely. The availability of resources does make the game far more accessible to survival horror neophytes, though. This could have been solved by a simple recommendation attached to the difficulties, which makes me wonder why there was none.



Conclusion:

Overall, Dead Space is a masterful and extremely polished survival horror game with no significant flaws, held back from perfection by minor issues. It's a necessary purchase for any survival horror fan, and anybody who can play the game should strongly consider buying it.


Graphics: 10
Sound: 10
Story: 10
Gameplay: 9
Longevity: 8

Weighted score: 95%

Adjusted score: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/29/08

Game Release: Dead Space (US, 10/13/08)