Dead Space Review

Here’s a question for you, what do you get if you cross Resident Evil with Mass Effect? EA’s latest foray in to the survival horror genre, Dead Space, that’s what. In a genre dominated by already well known titles such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill, Electronic Arts dare to try something a little bit different.

Dead Space
Developer: Visceral Games
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (reviewed)

Set in the distant future, the story takes place in space, on board the mining ship USG Ishimura. USG Ishimura has sent out a distress call to galactic command, and you’re sent in as part of the team assigned to find out why. You control Isaac Clarke, a systems engineer. You wouldn’t know it though, since he doesn’t speak throughout the entire game. Not long after the team arrive, your ship is destroyed leaving you stranded. In typical survival horror fashion, you’re split up from the rest of the team and forced to wonder the corridors alone, and it’s not long before you’ve acquired your first weapon and you’re blowing holes in large aliens known as Necromorphs. Apart from the first weapon, which you acquire near the start, all the weapons are acquired by finding schematics around the ship, which when found allow the weapons to purchased in the shop with credits that are also found scattered around the ship. Once you’ve purchased a weapon or armour, you can take them to a workbench to upgrade them. Upgrading weapons and armour is simple, but fairly effective. You use nodes that, you guessed it, you find around the ship, to beef up areas such as damage, reload time, and round capacity. This method of upgrading, whilst fairly straight forward, allows the player to choose which areas to upgrade, and is executed quite well. Since it’s impossible to max out all your weapons in one play through, you might find yourself coming back to continue upgrading them. The variety of weapons isn’t bad either, with everything from flamethrowers to kinesis powers at your disposal, all of which also have an alternate fire mode, which keeps it interesting.

The combat in Dead Space is one of the game’s strongest points. Unlike enemies in other games, attacking Necromorphs in the body doesn’t do much good. Instead you’ll have to aim for body parts in order to dispatch them efficiently. Taking out the arms, legs, and heads first is advised, as shooting them in the body only serves to aggravate them further. This can make the game pretty tough at times, but it helps to keep combat challenging, especially at later points in the game when you find yourself fighting off swarms. The game is quite combat heavy, but luckily the controls aren’t too clunky and the third person view works well. There were only one or two occasions in which I wasn’t able to maneuver myself in ways like I would have liked to, and it doesn’t happen often enough to become frustrating. You can also sprint by holding the left bumper, which can be incredibly useful when you’re overwhelmed. It should be noted however, that towards the end of the game you might find that fighting the same kinds of enemies grows a little repetitive.

The atmosphere in the game is good, but not great. When you first arrive, you do feel as if something is amiss on board the ship, and you do want to explore and unravel the mystery. This is where the game hits a brick wall. Whilst the plot isn’t terrible, the execution of the story is dire. Happenings and objectives aren’t explained well, and at times I couldn’t even remember why I was completing certain objectives. For example, we know that Isaac has personal connections to some of the people that were on board the ship, but this is never really explored as much as it could, and should have been. The story plods along and doesn’t really do anything until near the end of the game. You do find written and audio journals around the ship in an attempt to fill in some back story, but it just doesn’t make up for the lack of explanation given as you work your way through the chapters.

If you can manage to forget about the short comings of the story, it is quite possible to get emerged in the world you’ve entered as you walk around eerie rooms and hall ways. The attention to detail in your surroundings is good, with everything from limbs to tools lying around the corridors. Despite the brooding feeling of the game, complete with dead bodies that float in zero gravity, the game never really did much to scare me. Sure, it made me jump once or twice, but other than that I was never really made to feel frightened. You also find yourself backtracking through a lot of areas that you’ve already been through, which does take away part of the element of surprise, and considering the supposed size of the ship, does feel quite cheap. Fortunately you’re never stuck on where to go next, as pressing in the right thumb stick lights the path to your next location for you. The use of sound does go some way in attempting to pull you into the environment too, and you’ll hear enemies screaming from far away, and other odd sounds that really add to the feeling of despair. The voice acting is decent too, but not outstanding. The graphical aspect of the game holds up well, and whilst there isn’t much to look at, at times, the detailing on everything you do encounter is good. The game is gore filled, and you’ll witness Isaac having his legs cut off, or being decapitated more than a few times. The gore always looks kind of cool, and the animations never really look awkward. Despite being solid graphically, the environment doesn’t really change much for most of the game, and does start to feel slightly repetitive.

The Final Word

While Dead Space is ultimately a decent game, it’s let down by a couple of large flaws, such as the poor execution of the story and the repetitiveness of the gameplay. The monotony of the enemies and the environment might put you off playing through a second time, and since the game is fairly short, maybe around 10 hours long, this might make you think twice about handing over your hard earned cash for it. Fans of survival horror games will almost certainly enjoy it, and there is a good solid game to be found in Dead Space if you can deal with it’s short comings.

– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good