Game Review: Dead Space
Electronic Arts has come under alot of bad heat lately about rehashing franchises, and Dead Space shows that they are still capable of original ideas. I recently played through it on the 360, and it was a pretty fun game.
The story goes something like this, without giving away background spoilers. You are part of a repair crew that is called out to the U.S.G. Ishimura, a starship that was built to 'crack planets' for deep-space mining operations. It's a huge ship, built with families in mind. Your character is named Issac Clarke, and your job is an engineer. Unknown to the repair crew though, the ship is infected. An alien prescence has come up from the planet's surface along with an alien artifact, and in classic Aliens fashion is taking over the ship.
Let's talk about the atmosphere of the game, which mostly takes place on the Ishimura. As you travel around the ship, the environment ranges from standard sci-fi ship interior fare to serious alien growth biological stuff as you get closer to more heavily infected regions. Background music is used VERY sparingly, mostly limited to a children's song you hear looping in the off-duty areas. I swear, I'll never think of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star quite the same way again.
Most of your weapons are repurposed mining tools, reflecting the fact that you didn't show up here to kick alien ass. Unlike most shooters where headshots are the best way of going about the butcher's bill, in this game the aliens are reanimating corpses in such a way that heads really aren't needed anymore. You take off a head, all you're doing is spending more ammo. What you have to learn, and learn quick, is the fine art of dismemberment.
Which brings us around to the alien threat themselves. They have two objectives really. To infect and reanimate corpses, and kill poeple off to make more corpses. EA did a good job with creating new kinds of monsters for this game, alot of variety and creativity went into it. You have basic melee units which come at you with long, spindly limbs to blow off. A critter that's not very large that likes to stick to walls, extend tentacles and shoot you with them, and jump on your face if you get too close. Some really wicked, low and fast scorpion-inspired models that leap from oblique angles, and creatures that give birth to other creatures if you take them out the wrong way.
One of the creepier points in the game are the small ones. Some are simply human heads running around on tentacles, but some of them, like the one I described above (called a Lurker), are actually animated toddlers. As parent, that was abit on the disturbing side of things for me. For some more information on the monsters themselves, here's a link to the creature page on the Dead Space wiki.
http://deadspace.wikia.com/wiki/Necromorphs
I said earlier that EA came up with some pretty original ideas, and two of those were the way you upgrade your equipment, and the implemtation of gravity effects like Zero-G and haywire gravity plating. Let's talk about gravity first. There are times in the game when you have to move around in a zero-G environment, and you do so by aiming with your main weapon and pressing a button to jump. (which is the only time you can jump in the game, BTW). This leads to a few 360-degree areas which overall were designed pretty well. Dealing with ambushes literally from all sides takes some getting used to.
Gravity is addressed with gravity plating, which is to say that the ship dosen't rotate or spin, but the floor is still the floor. Most games or sci-fi in general would leave it at that, but there are areas where the plating is broken. You'll see shafts of blue light and particles flying upwards to the ceiling, and you can use this to your advantage. By stasis-stunning aliens and pushing them into these gravity traps, you will spray them all over the ceilings and save yourself a nice chunk of ammo. Just don't get too close, or you'll find yourself reloading from the last checkpoint.
As for upgrading your equipment, you do it with "power nodes". These are found all over the game, and can be purchaed from in-game autovendors where you can also purchase ammunition and equipment. For a survival horror game, it's fairly generous with rounds. A nice feature is that ammo types drop according to what you're currently carrying around. Although other types *can* drop, you're much more likely to find stuff related to what you need.
This is getting abit off track, however. When you go to upgrade your gear, you take some power nodes to a workbench, which opens up some more options for you. There, you can select weapons that you have on you, or various aspects of your armor. A schematic then appears, in which you plug these nodes into circuts. You will only be able to upgrade two weapons and your armor on the first playthrough though, so make your choices carefully. I've linked an example of a weapon schematic below.
http://deadspace.wikia.com/wiki/File:Bench_branches.jpg
In closing, I want to say that this was a very fun game, and I was able to completely finish it in about 40 hours. (three playthroughs, including impossible mode, to unlock all 1000 achievement points). I would definately recommend renting this one, or picking it up used somewhere for $30 or less. I wouldn't pay more than that for it though, because once you're done with it there's no multiplayer options for an extended playing experience. The story was very top-notch though, and I'd give Dead Space a solid 8 out of 10 overall.