Dead Space, try not to shit yourself... Options

[Xepher]

Dead Space is a third person, over the shoulder, sci-fi based, survival horror game.(damn thats a long opening sentence.) It starts out with your character, engineer Isaac Clake, and a small crew boarding the U.S.S Ishimura. A planet cracker class space ship. The Ishimura has been sending out an S.O.S call and you've been assigned to asses the situation and repair it.

Shit goes terribly wrong when everyone gets attacked by a creepy something within the first five minutes of gameplay and you get seperated from the rest of your group.(true survival horror fashion.) Now you and two other crew members, a scientist and a security officer, must survive long enough to find a way off the ship.


The gameplay is pretty straight forward. Theres not really a whole lot of wandering around to do. Little spaces here and there with some item pickups. But most of the time youll be walking down halls to grab some item and back while waiting to be attacked.

The game features somthing I dont think ive ever heard of in a game. Your enemies can only be killed by taking their limbs off. Thats right. You can shoot them in the head all you want. Hell even take it clean off their shoulders. Theyll still come after you. Some will even regenerate body parts or spawn more freaky little spawns of hell while fighting you. It makes for a pretty unique play experience where you dont have a set health for enemies. You can blast away at the torso all day and go through all your ammo and still not kill an enemy. It forces you to be really strategic with your aiming to conserve your slightly limited ammo.

It should be noted that there is no HUD for this game. Everything you need appears on screen in the form of halograms. Health, air, and stasis(time freezing power!) gauges are displayed on the back of Isaacs RIG. Ammo is displayed as a little box whenever you ready or fire a weapon. Inventory, mission objectives, maps, and mission logs appear through a menu holograms that springs forth from Isaacs arm. Hell, you can even make a line appear that lays out a path to your next mission destination. Finally no more wrong way, where the hell do i go now backtracking!

The soundtrack is just flat out creepy. It just adds the perfect tone to a deserted ship with a bunch of moving shadows. It really put me in that on edge feeling where I ended up moving slowly expecting to be attacked at any moment. Imagine being in a slow moving elevator and hearing a female voice whisper the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star slowly.. Its just plain unsettling.

A few things I have a major gripe with though. The controls, especially movement seemed awkward. Moving my character just felt slow and clunky. Kinda like playing survival horror games on the original Playstation. And then the many times I didnt hold L1 down firm enough, so I started melee attacks. So then I had to let go, let the animations stop, get hit a bunch of times and then try again. I remember one time in particular where I almost got beat down to death because it wouldnt register me readying my gun before attacking for what felt like 2 minutes. The second being this game was obviously made for HDTVs. I have an SDTV and often found myself straining or just plain giving up on reading any text that appeared in the menus.


Dead Space is a pretty short game. You can do a playthrough in about 10-15 hours. Theres a lot of trophies to be collected for it though. Enough to warrant maybe two or three replays, but I cant see myself playing this game much after I 100% it. I heard theres talk of some DLC for it, but as of my last checking the only DLC was a video comic series that detailed what happened before the game, and a some new outfits.


All in all, Dead Space has a quality storyline to it with some marvelous new ideas that are perfectly executed. It will scare the shit outta you. It has a few control mechanics that I wish wouldve been changed. Even still, I would go so far as to say this is a must own game of the year.

I give it a 9/10