Dead Space

"Shoot them in the...leg?"

For the last two generations, survival-horror has been one of the genres that everyone seemed to latch onto just as naturally as they would RPGs or first-person shooters. From Resident Evil to Silent Hill, nearly every gamer dipped their toes into the glory that is survival-horror but towards the end of the last generation, the genre began to die. Generic, boring, and outright terrible games were being released relentlessly, like Rule of Rose, with the occasional lost gem like Obscure. Resident Evil 4 took one of survival-horror's founding fathers and turned it more into an action game (while it's a very awesome title, it just isn't really survival-horror), and the current generation has had next to nothing in the genre. We've had a terrible sequel to Alone in the Dark and one installment in the Silent Hill franchise with other games that almost meet the genre's criteria but fall short like Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Thankfully, EA has brought us a great game that is as true to survival-horror as you could possibly get, and that game is Dead Space.

If you're a fan of Resident Evil 4, you'll probably like Dead Space for the reasons that it uses Resident Evil 4's camera angle and aiming system. It also borrows other mechanics from Resident Evil 4 such as buying, selling and upgrading weapons, ammo, and items and picking up plenty of supplies from fallen foes. However, you might be turned off by Dead Space due to its old-school level of difficulty that makes Resident Evil 4 look like a cakewalk (not that it wasn't before; and I'm not trying to bash Resident Evil 4, but it just isn't survival-horror).

Dead Space's main game mechanic is the dismemberment of limbs as opposed to simply pumping your enemies full of led to take them down. This leads to more interesting enemy designs such as little bug-like creatures with tentacles sticking out of their backs and really messed up monsters with two scythe-like claws that they can easily kill you with. To defeat an enemy, you have to take out their limbs, whether that is a leg, claw or whatever, and while this is a little tricky sometimes, it layers the game with a sense of dread that keeps you realizing that you have to be very precise with your shots or face the possibility of death or a downhill spike to your health.

Your health isn't represented by a HUD or Isaac's (the protagonist) physical cues. Instead, there is a blue tube on the back of Isaac's armor that depletes when you are hit and recharges when you make an upgrade to your suit or heal yourself by tapping the X button (assuming you have first-aid of course). Your ammo is also represented by a little number that appears in a hologram whenever you aim with a weapon so the screen is cluttered by a bunch of numbers and meters.

You can upgrade your armor, your weapons, and other abilities that Isaac has by approaching Benches. You can't use your money, or credits, to upgrade yourself but instead you have to find power nodes that you use to place on a grid that is reminiscent to the leveling system from Final Fantasy X. It takes a while for this to really kick in, but after a few hours of gameplay, you will be having a blast making the right tactical choices of which you need to upgrade.

There are also stores that you can visit in order to restock on your supplies, sell things, or store your items if you find you have too much to carry. In Dead Space, you will run out of ammo and health quite a bit, so you will have to make some sacrifices at these stores in order to keep afloat.

As for the weapons available to you, you have your standard Plasma Cutter which is a pretty damn powerful pistol and you also have some pretty interesting weapons like a flamethrower and another weapon that allows you to control a saw to saw the limbs off of enemies. Each weapon has a secondary function, ala Perfect Dark Zero, and these can sometimes really save your ass. The Plasma Cutter, for example, can alter its aiming lasers from horizontal to vertical and vice versa by tapping RB in order to make it easier to cut off specific limbs. Other weapons have more distinct capabilities such as shooting proximity mines and firing out of its sides for some crowd control.

You aren't limited to just using standard weapons to take out your enemies. By pulling the right trigger, Isaac will swing whatever weapon you're holding in a wide arc in an attempt to knock enemies back for an easier shot while if you tap RB he will stomp on the ground, which can be used to kill enemies to conserve some ammo or to smash open boxes that hold supplies in them.

Ever since BioShock, video games have been milking telekinesis like none other, and Dead Space goes down this route as well. Isaac can pick up nearly anything with his telekinesis and use it for fighting enemies or to solve one of the game's many puzzles, which it usually is used for. Isaac also has the ability to freeze enemies in stasis which can give you the opportunity to line up your shots better and to make sure you don't waste too much ammo on a single enemy.

Puzzles are plentiful in Dead Space, just like in any good survival-horror title, and while they are mostly straightforward affairs, there are some toughies here, and a lot of them have some one-hit kills involved that will send you back to a previous checkpoint.

Most survival-horror titles have a big flaw: backtracking. Whenever you get stuck, you find yourself walking around all over the place in tired environments until you eventually find something that leads you to the next area to get stuck in but not in Dead Space. The game tells you exactly where to go pretty much all the time by showing you a little blue line to follow. This doesn't make the game too easy since most of the game isn't built around exploration anyway, though exploration is definitely killed by this mechanic, but rather in the battles that you are sometimes forced to fight against multiple powerful enemies at once.

What's the point of having a video game set in space if you're not going to take advantage of the gameplay opportunities the setting presents? There are areas in Dead Space where you can jump around on the walls due to zero-gravity and there are other areas where you will be in a vacuum, meaning that you have a limited air supply to accomplish whatever you're trying to accomplish, so you better do it fast.

Unfortunately, Dead Space isn't perfect. The game falls into a monotony of go to one room, solve some of the ship's lame problems to unlock the next area and repeat. This formula would have worked wonders ten years ago, but in today's gaming world, this just isn't the case. Does it make Dead Space bad? Absolutely not. Dead Space is still an exceptional survival-horror title, but it borrows some of the problems that old-school survival-horror games had as well, such as this monotony.

Some parts of Dead Space's plot are a tad predictable, but there are still some surprises here and there that will undoubtedly make your jaw drop. You won't really care much about Isaac throughout the whole adventure as he really doesn't develop much at all as a character, but you will be interested in seeing what happens to the other characters. Other parts of the story don't have a chance to develop, but for the most part, Dead Space is a nice survival-horror title that has the chills and the thrills and plenty of scares to keep you alert. There's just nothing like being out of ammo and running from a group of enemies without really knowing if you're going to be able to make it to safety or not. Anyway, Dead Space tells the tale of Isaac, who works as a space miner, and he and a few other people respond to a space station's distress call, but when they get there, as I'm sure you've figured out, things aren't exactly normal.

The larger enemies in Dead Space look absolutely gorgeous and you'll be surprised when you realize that they aren't in a cut-scene, but its actual gameplay right before you. The enemy designs are interesting and Isaac's armor looks badass when you buy the newer upgrades. While the environments do get a little on the boring side after a while, there is plenty of sweet effects, such as stomping the legs off of dead body, that give the game a gruesome charm unfounded in other titles. I didn't experience a single glitch or texture loading throughout the entirety of Dead Space, so it's obvious that this is an extremely polished title.

Musical jumps and the loud cries of the beasts in Dead Space will have you jumping out of your chair and the threatening score sets the survival-horror mood perfectly. Most of the sound effects work out brilliantly and you will be sweating when you hear Isaac's choking attempts at breathing when you're running out of oxygen, but it is sometimes difficult to hear some of the other characters in the game over the title's music and such.

Dead Space can be completed in about nine hours, but it has a ton of replayability. You can go through the game again with everything you had at the end of your last game plus some. If you've played Resident Evil 4, you probably know how much fun this is. While it won't take an awful long time to unlock everything and fully upgrade all of your items and the achievements aren't too great and are rather easy to achieve, there are some mini-games hidden in Dead Space such as a shooting range and zero-gravity basketball. There not that big or anything, but they provide a minor distraction and chances are that you are going to miss one, if not both, of these mini-games on your first play-through of the game.

Dead Space does so many things right and blends unique gameplay and current generation physics with an old-school level of difficulty to achieve classic status. The visuals are eye-popping, the soundtrack is great and chilling, plus the replayability is literally through the roof. Unfortunately, some of the objectives are a little on the boring side, the environments can get extremely repetitive during long playing sessions, and the audio quality isn't the greatest. All in all, EA did an excellent job at a survival-horror title and hopefully more games will take after Dead Space and survival-horror will get the fresh titles it desperately needs.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/09

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