Game Review: DeadSpace
Posted on 18. Nov, 2008 by Alfred Romeu in Game Reviews
Dead Space is one of those games that doesn’t really do anything new at all for gaming as a whole. no innovative game play elements or any such thing going on here, but what the game does best is grab and pull together a wide range of different features and ideas from others games and refine them to the point where altogether it makes the game feel like a breath of fresh air. All of its parts make for such a solid game that it’s a pleasure to play no matter how suspenseful and intimidating it might be to do so.
Story
You’re engineer Isaac Clarke sent with your team over to investigate the non responsive deep space planet cracker USG Ishimura, a huge mining craft housing thousands of personnel as it travels known space and literally cracks planets open to mine them for precious metals and ore. To sum it all up, shit goes south just about as soon as you step foot in the place. The thousands of crew members I mentioned earlier? They all got turned into undead piles of butchered meat with the sole intent of scaring you and eating your face. The game has a fairly typical story, nothing you haven’t seen before really. It’s told through your suit’s awesome hologram projector. This works well for the most part and helps to give you a sense of detachment from any other living thing that works to give a creepy lonely feeling. The story has its twists and its depth but it’s nothing out of this world and like most sci-fi based games they sadly turn out on the predictable side, but lucky enough for Dead Space they pace it expertly and make all your tasks enjoyable. My one grip with the storytelling in the game is just with the fact that the main character never speaks which makes him seem robotic and emotionless, as far as I’m concerned he’s got the biggest pair of balls in history just waltzing into that hellish ship and taking care of business as though he always knew the day would come, so it kind of ruins some key moments in the game where they try and make things emotional.
Visuals
The game looks superb. Really it’s a feast for the eyes; all the particle effects and lighting are implemented to near perfection and the fact that there is no HUD what so ever makes things feel so smooth and engrossing that you really get sucked into the game. All the information that would be on the HUD is cleverly placed on the back of Isaacs’s suit or displayed via hologram on top of your weapon, displaying your ammo. All of the textures and crisp and clear with hardly any blurry ones and the atmosphere is for the most part dark and tension filled. It always feels like something is going to come out of god knows where and eat your face, and sometimes that’s exactly what happens, but it looks so good when it does that once you’re done shrieking you’ll admire your own dismemberment, which is fantastic looking by the way. The main characters’ suit and model, along with all the insane creatures, overall are really well designed (and cool as shit) and the animations of the myriad of spiky meat people you combat through the game are spot on. It’s hard to find a better looking game on any system right now aside from the pc and games like Crysis that border on the ridiculous.
Music/Sound Design
It isn’t everyday you get to play a game with such great sound design and although the music, apart from the atmospheric hums and drones, is adequate at its best but fits into the scheme with perfection. The tracks won’t exactly stand on their own or anything but they lend a simple charm to the goings on, most of the time you hardly notice it, and that’s partly because you’re nearly dying at every turn. It’s creepy and foreboding and helps to set the mood with the rest of the games strong features but this is honestly the key feature. The sounds are clear and you can tell how much detail they put into noise placements because the sound more than anything else is out to scare the living shit out of you and it easily can.
Game Play
If you’ve played Resident Evil 4 then you know how it plays already, it’s almost an exact duplicate, and if you haven’t played it then you really don’t deserve to be among the living, go play it! It’s an over the shoulder third person view that puts you right into the action, you aim and shoot much in the same way as RE4 but this time the unimaginable has occurred, now you can move AND shoot! It sounds like something stupid that should have always been there but if you played RE4 you had to put up with stopping and taking aim anytime you wanted to shoot, no walking back as you shoot or nothing, you just had to sit there and take it like a man. Anyway it’s a great addition that completes that system that RE4 made sexy. Besides that there is a stasis ability and a telekinesis power that you can use to freeze enemies and objects and lift obstacles or dismembered limbs and throw them as makeshift weapons, respectively. Besides fighting and walking/running you don’t do anything else besides man a turret a couple of times throughout the game to take on a boss and some asteroids. Like I said before the objectives are fun and the path to the next one is always highlighted when you use a nifty little gadget on your suit that when you press a button id literally draws a line to where you need to go next, a little touch but honestly I found myself using it all the time and loving it. Dispatching your enemies is great fun since it’s all about using your tool themed weapons to hack off limbs and obliterating former crewmembers with a sweet vertical/horizontal plasma beam that cuts them in half or however you want to cut ‘em, the gore detail is good enough to do a number of cuts all over the place. Also like RE4 the game allows you to upgrade weapons and your suit by means of power nodes which you can either buy with credits picked up from bodies or randomly across the game or in key locations that are sometimes easily missed, but unlike resident evil Dead Space allows you to buy ammo and health restoring items and oxygen tanks for when you take part in the games few outdoor zero-G spacewalks. Boss fights are fun as well but don’t exactly offer anything dramatically different from what you have already been doing the whole time. It’s an enjoyable time out in space but in the end it feels a slightly short, although it is longer than most short games this generation, and once you see the end credits there isn’t exactly anything else to do besides play on a harder difficulty.
The Run Down
It’s a great thing when we can get a game like Dead Space which takes survival horror back to literal survival while still hitting you with scares. All the parts come together to make a very memorable experience that is sure to please and surprise most gamers with its quality and style. While it may have its issues with a robotically stoic character and minute replay value its still worth checking out, so Make sure to give it a go if you’re interested in badass space engineers with cutting tools and the will to put drive them into the skulls of his enemies.
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