EA took a departure from the sanitized world of big, safe, corporate multi-sequel sports, action and racing games and did a little something different: they took a stab at survival horror with their new franchise Dead Space. In fact, it’s a big bloody stab that more than earns its M rating. Emphasis on the blood. And the stabbing.
In Dead Space, you are inserted into the role of Isaac, a random space engineer whose crew has been tasked to figure out why a big planet cracking corporate ship (the Ishimura… or as I like to call it, “the EA”) has gone incommunicado. Isaac is pretty cool for a guy who took breathing lessons from Darth Vader and walks around in a big Iron Man-type suit… well, he has cool abilities, which he uses to great effect running around The EA dismembering evil alien hive-mind hordes. Did I mention that Isaac’s girlfriend is stranded somewhere on the ship? Well she is, even though it doesn’t impart any gravitas or emotional ties to any of the characters. It’s “extra motivation for the sake of motivation” plot device because for all we know, Isaac doesn’t care because doesn’t display any emotion.
Once onboard the Ishimura, Isaac is sent out to complete a bunch of tasks that largely consist of pushing buttons, figuring out an occasional puzzle and chopping off the limbs of very many mutated alien/human hybrid thingies that are all very, very ill-tempered. In typical form, the bad guys get bigger, meaner and tougher as the game goes on.
Isaac is really well equipped to handle the trouble that comes his way. He’s outfitted with some tough armor that gives him telekinesis, provides a limited air supply in a vacuum (because Air Supply should always be offered in limited quantities) as well as provides an ability called Stasis which basically freezes stuff for a short amount of time. Stasis is probably the most important ability, because you need it to solve puzzles and lop off heads and arms and legs. Isaac also gets a nice plasma cutter thing which cuts through flesh pretty quickly, which is handy in a game whose primary combat game mechanic is dismemberment. There are other weapons, but I only played through using the Plasma Cutter thingamajob.
Dead Space is a good game, however, it falls short of being great. The game mechanics are pretty sound and polished, if a little bit repetitive. The game looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, controls really well and the in-game UI screens are really fantastic. The level design and puzzles offer a good variety of challenge and break up some of the repetition really well.
Dead Space tries really hard to be scary and comes up short because shock value horror wears off pretty quickly. The game doesn’t do much to build suspense because it doesn’t play with your mind and generate an emotional response to the action that’s taking place in front of you. Having a main character that looks and acts like a robot doesn’t help. You don’t get to build any kind of emotional attachment to Isaac, so you don’t really get scared.
The gore factor in Dead Space is turned up to 11, which gets tiresome and repetitive really quickly. I’m sure teenagers and Fangoria fans love it. I would have loved to be able to skip through some of the extended Isaac death scenes I experienced.
Dead Space’s story is also extremely derivative. If you’ve seen Aliens or The Thing and combine it with some huge creatures from Gears of War, you kind of get the idea. Again, the lack of characterization doesn’t help here. You can see all the plot twists coming because they’ve been done before.
Dead Space is a good, fun game. An obvious amount of polish went into the gameplay, design and aesthetics. If they get the horror aspect down, EA could be onto something.
Four out of five stars
