Dead Space: My October Surprise
October 25, 2008 3:26 pm Games for Fun, Gaming
I honestly wasn’t that excited about Dead Space. There were a few people in the office who religiously watched preview videos for this game, but I just couldn’t get into it. That main character looked weird to me and Dead Space seemed like a pretty standard third person game. It didn’t grab me initially and I didn’t plan on purchasing it. However, once the game was released, it started getting decent reviews (mostly around 90) so I took another look. Other people I knew started playing it and loving it, so I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I’m glad I did.
Dead Space is what I call a “well done game.” It’s not super innovative or ground breaking, but every aspect of the game (save a few gameplay events, which I’ll get to later) from design to art to animation to sound (especially sound) is executed so smoothly. Dead Space certainly borrows from many other games. Influences from games like Doom 3, Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War are apparent, but Dead Space feels like a game you haven’t quite played before.
Dead Space is a sci-fi themed, third person survival horror game (try saying that ten times fast). So, if you don’t like meat or metal than this isn’t the game for you. The story is pretty straightforward. You play as Issac, who is an engineer with sweat metal plates on his space suit and an extremely powerful tool (gun) known as a “plasma cutter”. You’re on a mission to repair a “planet cracker” which is giant ship that mines entire planets. However, you find out that once on board, there are some nasty aliens (necromorphs) running around that have killed the crew and taken over their bodies. You shoot your way through all the ex-crew while trying to re-activate the ship.
There’s a lot of good things to say about this game. I usually wouldn’t start with sound, but the sound and sound design in Dead Space are done so incredibly well, I’d put money on this sound department winning tons of awards this year. The music is especially well done and even plays tricks with your mind sometimes. There’s plenty of tension building ramp-ups, stingers for when enemies drop in or break through a vent and ethereal ambient music during slower paced areas which create a solid foundation for the atmosphere of the game. The sound effects are just as good. Ambient effects of necromorphs climbing through vents or growling always make you stop and look around. I always feet like there could be an enemy popping out at any second.
Really, the only bad part about the sound were the voice-overs. The acting just wasn’t as good as a lot of recent games. It wasn’t even as good as those late night movies on the Sci-Fi channel. This makes the story feel a little cheap, but it’s not game ruining. The acting could have been a lot better though, and I think the so-so VO and some of the story elements (like monologues from crazy people behind bullet proof glass that happens too often) kept this game from getting higher review scores.
The art is very well done too. I can’t remember a game I’ve played lately that made the environments feel as though people were just there a few hours or days before. The levels feel lived in and they make sense, which I think is a challenge when you’re on a giant space ship that could look like anything. If you look at game, like Quake IV for instance, you don’t get a sense of where you’re supposed to be. Sometimes you’ll be headed down a hallway and the walls will be covered with some random pipes and textures. In Dead Space, each hallway and room feels like it belongs in the ship.
The character art and design is good as well. I suppose it has to be since it’s a third person game and there’s always a lot of focus on your character, but the upgrade system really accentuates this. As your armor gets better, you see more chunks of armor applied to Issac’s suit and your helmet starts looking more bad-ass. You health and stasis (stasis allows you to freeze characters) meters are placed on Issac’s back so that a separate health meter is required on the HUD. All other characters have the same gauge on their back so you don’t have to question why you’re the “special” one. The attention to detail in Dead Space is incredible.
The enemy character design is really genius. The designers took away the one thing that everyone expects to kill enemies with: head shots. They then distributed the effectiveness of an enemy killing head shot across all the limbs of an enemy, which totally changes the shooting gameplay. So, to take an enemy down, you now have four ways to do it effectively. Taking off their arms will probably kill them, but that leaves their legs to run at you and ruin your day. So the best thing to do it blow out a leg, make them crawl at you slowly, while you take off their arms. Since the limb shots do more damage, head shots are more or less worthless. This is such a perfect system for a survival horror game, and it mixes up the gameplay enough to make it feel like a very different game.
There was one part of the game that annoyed me which involves manning a turret and shooting at asteroids about to hit your ship. Sounds good on paper, but it was fairly difficult to aim and hit the asteroids. The turret can also overheat which makes the event even more frustrating as a single overheat will end up with tons of asteroids blasting into your ship. Reading around on message boards, other gamers have had similar (or worse) experiences. It’s too bad this wasn’t caught in focus testing. I don’t think this event was supposed to be as frustrating as it was, and I could see gamers stopping at this point and not playing any more. However, the bright side is that this is the only bad part about the game in my mind.
The weapons in Dead Space are also very different from any game I’ve played, both in look and feel. All the weapons have a blue laser targeting beams that allows you to see where your shot will end up. This ends up being critical as ammo is hard to come by, and you want to be sure your shot is landing on a limb. All the weapons have a secondary fire which range from necessary to nearly useless. For example, the plasma cutter has a secondary fire which turns the vertical firing beam into a horizontal one, which becomes extremely important when taking off enemy limbs at odd angles. However, the flamethrower has a secondary fire which is just a burst of flame which doesn’t feel much different from firing the weapons regularly. In any event, all the weapons feel unique and interesting to use (especially the “ripper”, which sends a circular saw blade hovering out in front of you to chop limbs off with).
The upgrade system is pretty straight forward but adds some nice choice for the player. During your adventure, you’ll come across “power nodes” which can be applied to your weapons, suit (RIG) , or various other abilities to increase their damage, your health, and so on. You can also buy nodes at the various automated stores scattered across levels for 10,000 credits. In order to apply a node to your gear, you need to find a work bench, also scattered around various levels. Then a sort of “power grid” appears and you can follow a chain of abilities to upgrade your weapons. So the player has the choice of what weapons they want to upgrade, and how they want to go about upgrading them.
Dead Space offers lots of choices in it’s level design as well. I played through twice to test out how flexible the designs were (and to get some extra achievements of course) and it turns out they’re pretty flexible. The game has a loosely-hub based design. In most levels you start on a tram and end up coming back to the same tram to go to the next level. As you get deeper into a level though, you find that you’ll have two or three separate areas which need to be explored for you mission. The designers did a good job of making the objectives feel unique which can be tricky when you give the players lots of choices. To be fair, some of the later levels objectives start to feel same-y, such as collect all three key cards. Also, towards the end of the game the fact that you’re going on all these wild goose chases starts to feel artificial. Luckily the game is over before you go “Do I have to activate another part of this ship?”
The Zero-G events are really cool, and the developers even managed to make a mini game out of it: Zero G Basketball. There are sections of levels which feel really intense since there’s no air and you need to rush through before you die of suffocation. Sometimes they’re mixed, like when you have to outside of the ship. These portions mix up shooting gameplay with more puzzle-y aspects. In general, the puzzle portions of the game aren’t tough to figure out, but again, they just make sense in the world and they don’t feel contrived. Contrast this with your typical puzzle in say, a Silent Hill game.
I feel like I’m leaving out a lot. In any event, EA and the team working on this game did an excellent job with Dead Space, so kudos to them. Just about every aspect of the game is well done which they should be proud of considering the amount of bad press EA has gotten in the past. Dead Space is scary (I jumped plenty of times) and fun. Keep the trend up please!