The Game Seers Podcast

Last week I picked up Dead Space as planned (day one of course), and just a couple hours ago I finished the last chapter. In the end the game comes close to delivering in all the ways we knew it would; the visuals and sound are above and beyond anything we’ve seen this year; but it does fall short when it comes to some of the more technical game mechanics. Though the atmosphere and presentation are unmatched in quality, it’s the underlying details that keep this game from being truly excellent. That being said, Dead Space is still a good, maybe even great, game, and it’s an experience every hardcore gamer should try, even if it’s only in the form of a rental.

By now we all know the basics. You play as Isaac Clark, an engineer sent to repair the interstellar mining vessel, the USG Ishimura. When you arrive at the desolate ship, you quickly learn the entire crew has been turned into grotesque monsters that want nothing more than to rip you to shreds, literally. It’s not long after that the repair vessel you came in on is destroyed, and you are left to survive with only a hand full of allies (from which you are quickly separated), and the former crew of the Ishimura to keep you company. Your first goal is to survive, your second is to get off the ship through any means necessary, and you’ll need to hack your way through countless monsters to accomplish your task.

But there’s a hitch with the enemies you find in the game; to do any significant damage you need to sever their arms and legs. These monsters will do anything they can to get to you, and you need to use “strategic dismemberment” to make them unable to do so. Shoot off an enemy’s head and it won’t be able to see, but it will still attack wildly. If you take off a leg, it will drag itself along the ground to get to you. Cut off both it’s arms and it will use it’s mouth, or tail, or whatever it can to kill you. It’s an interesting mechanic, and it works as expected. After a while you begin to learn what body parts each enemy can’t live without, and it makes for some interesting confrontations, giving you something to think about rather than aiming at the head and chest over and over. Sometimes it takes more than one shot to completely destroy a limb, but the enemies will always react to the shots accordingly. In fact, that’s one thing I really liked about the combat in Dead Space, the enemies don’t just absorb bullets until their hit-points finally drop like in many other shooters, they will always react to a shot. It gives a more solid feel to the weapons, and makes encounters with large groups a little more manageable.

Though these encounters will happen quite often, they are not where Dead Space really shines. The atmosphere and presentation is what elevates this game above the competition. The game looks incredible. The lighting and particle effects are some of the best we’ve ever seen. Dark rooms illuminated only by a spinning alarm light and reserve power. Engine rooms glowing with hot ash, blasting through as the engines burn. Hallways left just dark enough to make you wonder what could be in the shadows. And the silent gloom of outer space that is left cold and still after the air has been evacuated. It all looks incredible. But as beautiful as this game is, Dead Space does suffer from a bit of repetitiveness when it comes to the environment. Since almost the entire game takes place on-board the Ishimura, the hallways, crew cabins, and dining areas all begin to look alike. The unique areas; engine rooms and industrial mining sections filled with massive set pieces, help to break up the monotony of hallways; but they are over fairly quickly, placing you back in the same old hallways all to soon. When you finally get a look at the sky near the end of the game, you begin to wish more of Dead Space took place in open air, rather than the single claustrophobic environment you‘ve been looking at for the past 12 hours. Though it was an obvious design decision to keep you trapped on the ship through the majority of the game, harkening back to so many classic science fiction films, it may not have been the best choice for a game that lasts many times longer.

The repetitive environments also compound one of the games biggest flaws, a lack of direction. Though you are given a brief description of a goal by an ally before setting out, you rarely actually know where you are going or for what reason. Throughout the entirety of the game, you are traveling to location A to get item B to return it to location C, but rarely do you remember just what those are until you actually get there, find the item, and get another briefing.
The game makes finding these locations and items easy though. Pressing down on the right thumb stick briefly draws a glowing blue line on the floor pointing to your goal, but it seems the designers use this more as a crutch than anything else. Without this marker you would never have any idea where you were going, and thanks to the limited variety of environments, it’s very hard to tell where you’ve actually been before. In place of clear goals and directions, the game designers chose to simply hold your hand the entire way, leading you to and through enemy encounter after enemy encounter, right up to your goal and back again. This mechanic is, at the same time, necessary but unrefined, discouraging exploration and causing players to simply follow along. You’re never lost, but at the same time you never quite know where you’re going.

That being said, the game does remain interesting as you slowly learn more about the Ishimura, it’s crew, and the events leading up to it’s current state. You will want to continue if for no other reason than to find out one more detail about the unfolding story. It’s done in an interesting enough manner that you will feel compelled to progress.

Better than any game before it, Dead Space never breaks out of itself, keeping you immersed in the roll almost completely. There is no HUD, all vital information is displayed on Isaac’s suit and the ammo indicator displays on the guns. When a character talks to you over com-link or via holographic video, it doesn’t pause the action or prevent you from doing anything you normally would. You can rotate the camera, brows your inventory, fire your gun, or traverse forward, all while being briefed. It keeps you in the action all the time. Something many other games should take note of. There are also no traditional cut scenes in Dead Space, you either watch them pan out right in front of you, or they are integrated with seamless animations going into and out of cinematic scenes without ever feeling like you’ve left Isaac’s shoulder.

This carries into enemy encounters as well. If you get attacked by and enemy and are forced to fend it off by hand, the camera may change angles slightly to show off the amazing animation, sometimes lasting for quite a while as Isaac fends off and beats the living daylights out of the unlucky foe. Or at least, that’s how you hope it happens. If Isaac is killed by these enemies, the deaths are done as seamless and cinematic as anything else, going straight from you controlling Isaac, to him being ripped apart. One of my favorite animation’s in the game is when Isaak gets killed by a small enemy that looks something like half octopus, half human head. The goal of these enemies is to rip your head off and take over your body, and when they do, it looks spectacular. After your head is disposed of, the camera pans in to show the enemy stick it’s legs into your neck, falling limp as it turns away and slowly pulling itself back up as the camera gets closer and pans around, walking out of frame with it’s new body. It looks like it could be part of a cut scene, but it can happen anytime, anywhere these enemies are present, and it really makes dieing seem like and appropriate end to Isaac’s life, how ever many times it happens.

The sound in this game, for the most part, is equally spectacular. The ambient noise and the harmless sound of the ship’s operation will freak you out more than anything else in the game. Every once in a while you will hear the sound of a pipe hitting the floor, or what you swear is the sound of a enemy moving around, without ever knowing where it came from, and without ever finding out. There is nothing scarier than not knowing what is around you, and this game will often have you walking around corners and through doorways with your gun drawn, so sure there is going to be something there, even when there is nothing. The sound of machinery kicking on; an engine roaring or a massive door creaking open; can be just as disturbing because, for a brief time, it makes you unable to detect enemies that may be around you, drowning out any sound they might be making. Even though enemies will rarely get the jump on you in these locations, it will put you on edge every time. Not knowing what’s around you is a scary feeling, and that’s often the effect the sound has in Dead Space.

Oddly enough, the times intended to be the most shocking end up falling flat. Whenever an enemy jumps out at you or even just walks up to you, there is such a barrage of string crescendos and noise, that it breaks any sort of real fear you may have been feeling. Humans are inherently programmed to jump at loud noises, and that works the first time, but after the fifth and fiftieth time you are hit with one of those crescendos, the effect is totally gone. When something jumps out at you accompanied by a loud noise, that is not real fear, it’s an instinctive reaction that quickly fades. Getting someone to jump at a moment like this is a cheap way to get a reaction, and every film maker knows it. It’s just that Dead Space does it over and over and over. In games like Resident Evil there was nothing more terrifying than absolute silence broken only by the sound of your own footsteps and gunshots. When an enemy noise did come out of this silence, even if it was just the sound of footsteps other than yours, you were scared out of your wits. Those games didn’t need a deafening crescendo to accomplish that. Dead Space never gives you that same feeling. Every encounter is filled with so much noise that it becomes ineffective very early in the game. Becoming nothing more than a minor annoyance by the time you’re through. You kill enemies until the noise stops and you move on. The outer space sections are the exception here. While in a vacuumed there is only muffled sound, and it works wonderfully. Sometimes less is more, and that’s something Dead Space could have really benefited from, both in terms of sound and enemy encounters.

In spite of it’s problems, Dead Space remains one of the most interesting games of the year. If nothing else, it’s refreshing to play an original IP that’s not a first person shooter. And the areas in which the game suffers are made up for by the incredible presentation. Any gamer that likes sci-fi themes, engaging story telling, and tense, violent action should definitely give this game a try. But unless you are a diehard fan of the genre, you may want to consider renting the game first.

-Aaron Thornton