Dead Space
A repair crew visits a damaged mining ship in orbit around a planet that has yielded more than just pure mineral goodness; now the repair crew need to fight off the crazed and mutated remains of the mining ship’s personnel and escape back into space and home.
Dead Space plays about the same as every other Over the shoulder third person horror game. Aiming is fairly good, scares are plentiful and the Graphics are above par. Some notable game play mechanics issues that I found annoying, no jump. Fire was not always fire, it was sometimes “flail” at air, requiring you to remember that the right mouse mutton needed to be pressed … OH DAMN I’M BEING EATEN AGAIN!!!!.
Never mind that you can’t run & shoot at the same time. The game just punished you for having the gun out, you walked extra slow if you brandished any weapon larger than the empty gloves, but ran fine if you just “carried” the weapon. I spent the majority of this game cursing or panicking, it was high school all over again. Whether it was running down halls praying that nothing would pop out or frantically trying to get the damn gun to fire (which never seemed to work if I didn’t keep it at “the ready” before a fight. Did I mention that I kept the gun “ready” for more than 5 hours in the game?
I took to launching mines into every room I entered, but that made no difference, as the monsters were often non there until I saw them. Let me state that again, if I couldn’t see the monster, it often wasn’t there. Which means I could shoot a mine into a room, have it explode, then run face first into the monster behind the door that wasn’t there until I saw it.
Perhaps if Issac ran through the whole game with his eyes closed, there would have been no monsters at all!
My rating: stars
I’m being overly critical, of course.
I played the game in small bursts; letting my heart rate slow to a near attack between firefights and enclosed space battles with small crowds of dessicated infants with serious worm issues. It wasn’t a “dark” game, which was refreshing, as many horror games hide the monsters in the dark and rely on them jumping out to get you (Doom 3, and so on). Dead Space scared you by letting you know the monsters were coming well in advance and that there was nothing you would be able to do to stop them, save gird your loins and find a solid wall to stand against or a long open space to run through.
The dismemberment mechanic worked fairly well, but beyond the really touch monsters, I was able to bludgeon or stomp most of them to death with minimal effort; which happened more than I would have liked. Also, I don’t think I killed a single human in the game. Which was a crime, as more than one human character needed to be dismembered by my line gun. C’est La Vie.
I played the Game on my Core Duo, on Windows Xp Sp3 with an Nvidia 8500GT video card and 2 gigs of ram. I turned off bloom, blur, motion blur, advanced lighting and shadows and played it at 1440×900. I don’t think I suffered one slowdown or hiccup in game play. Not one. It was solidly beautiful and fluid throughout, even without added dressing.
As for the plot, there were some fairly severe inconsistencies introduced; not the least of which was the Marker itself. I won’t stray into spoiler town, but I will state this, [spoiler] “THE MARKER WAS NOT THE SOURCE OF THE EVIL, IT WAS THE SOLUTION TO IT. “[/spoiler]