Dead Space is easily one of the best new franchises in recent memory, and this coming from a guy who doesn’t like survival horror. The fiction, while not terribly original, lays the foundation for what could easily become a game release that sees many sequels, and only gets better with time.
I won’t get to in depth with the story, it’s enough to keep you going from chapter to chapter, but again I don’t think it’s going to mindf*ck you. You play as Isaac Clarke, a space repair man, who is on an assignment to repair communications on a mining space ship called the USG Ishimura. You do have an emotional tie to someone on that ship, your ex Nicole is onboard…so you are hoping to see her again. Needless to say, there is a reason that communications don’t work on the ship, and those reasons want to stab, rip, claw, and do all sorts of bad things to you. You show up on the ship, and it quickly goes to shit, you become separated from your team, your means of escape have been cut off, they ran out of Twinkies in the mess hall, it is not a good day for you. Your goal: find your ex, find out what happened to everyone else, get the f*ck off the ship. Basically, bad stuff has happened, your stranded in the middle of nowhere caught up in that bad stuff, and you need to find a way out….so is the plot of so many horror games and movies. It’s not bad by any means, but there isn’t anything too original brought to the table.
Let me add that Dead Space is not a survival horror game; it’s an action horror game. Sure it’s got a deliberate pace, scary stuff, minor puzzling, etc…..all the things that define survival horror, but this game is easily more shoot happy than something like Resident Evil. If you’ve played a third person shooter, the controls are similar, nothing too surprising. You aim, you shoot, you reload…rinse and repeat. Your weapons are actually mining and repair equipment (with the exception of one gun) and throughout the course of the game you can upgrade them via a branching system, and as you progress you really want to upgrade those weapons to get thru the enemies in a more efficient manner. That leads into the hook for the game, which the developers call strategic dismemberment. Basically it means headshots are out….you want to remove the limbs, otherwise you have a headless creature flailing madly and it becomes a bit more aggressive. So instead of going for the head, you shoot off some legs and an arm, or some tentacles and a flipper, or stabby arm things and legs….you get the idea. Thankfully a decent amount of ammo drops for you throughout the game, and even with a fully loaded gun every situation still feels very tense. There are also two other abilities you gain, Telekinesis and Stasis. Telekinesis is used to manipulate puzzles, grab items, grab and shoot, and a few other things. Stasis is Dead Space’s time slow down ability, however instead of slowing down the entire world the stasis ability is targeted. The way the introduce the abilities into the game, they make sense and they will be used throughout the game in a few different ways.
Of course another reason it’s called action horror, is because there is a decent amount of horror in this. It is more Alien and Aliens like horror, than let’s say Saw, Friday the 13, and those type of movies. There is nothing overly disgusting in the game that makes you cringe, but the tension that the game delivers is spot on. Every room, every corridor, every bathroom….you just know something is going to be in there that you are going to have to kill, but you have to go in there, you don’t want to…but you have to. Of course then you walk into said area, and it’s all quiet…sure there are blood stains on the walls, some dead bodies…but it’s relatively quiet, so then you feel like an idiot. Of course that is what they want you to think…just as you relax, BOOM, a crazy tentacle baby comes down from the ceiling to stab you! The timing is just right, sure at times its balls to the walls, but at other times they let you lapse into a “okay, I’m safe” state and to me that is where the scares come from.
The atmosphere of the game is great, while the story may not grab you and pull you in, the game itself does a good job of using all of it’s design aspects to immerse you into the game. The sound design will mess with you, especially if you have surround sound. So many times there was something that would make a sound in the background and you just freeze, not just in the game…but you do as well just to make sure that was in the game, and not right behind you. And when you get forced into the vacuum of space, silence has never sounded so beautiful. The lighting in the game is designed to make you feel very uneasy…and it does. Dead Space’s use of flickering fluorescent lighting, strobe effects, and shadows all come together to keep you very unsettled. And the holographic HUD in this game is something that should be mirrored across other games, it really keeps you in the game.
Dead Space does miss on very few levels. The melee combat is not the best, just trying to stomp on something can be a challenge. I would have like to seen more variety in the weapons, a nail/rivet gun would have fit right in with the others. To be able to use the kinesis ability to forceably rip a limb off could have been useful and interesting. There were a few overly gamey sections to me….they aren’t bad, but they felt more game like and during those sections the only tension I felt was from losing, instead of feeling tension from the game itself. Still, these are minor issues and do not take away from the game at all.
To sum up, it’s a great game and I hope to see this franchise continue on. Do yourself a favor, rent or buy this game, dim the lights…turn up the sound and enjoy a great gaming experience.