Dead Space 2 - Where is my survival horror?

*WARNING: If you have not finished Dead Space and don’t want some plot points spoiled, then don’t read this review*

Just as a heads up since Dead Space and Dead Space 2 are so similar, I won’t go over the same points as I did for Dead Space, as I would only be re-treading ground I’ve previously talked about, instead I’ll talk about other things.

 

Dead Space 2 starts a number of years after Dead Space, Isaac wakes in a mental asylum on the Sprawl, a space station near Titan, Isaac has no knowledge of how we got there, nor how long he has been there, but thankfully a dude is kind enough to try and rescue us, but sadly he is quickly cut down while he tries to get Isaac out of the straight Jacket and is transformed into a necromorph, forcing Isaac to run for his life yet again and figure out what this whole mess is about, all the while being chased by a hallucination of his dead girlfriend thanks to marker he found on the Ishimura.

Now I did say earlier that Dead Space 2 is very similar to its predecessor, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any changes at all, one important one is that Isaac finally speaks and you see his face! After being mute for the last game, he finally has the chance to shine; which is great since it gives us the chance to truly bond with the guy and have him pluck our heart strings a bit. This really comes into play when he interacts with others and his hallucinations.

And you know that hallucination stuff is another biggie as you can’t be sure what you see is real, is it a necromorph or a living person? And if you’ve seen the promo materials then yes Isaac does get a new suit, you don’t get till later so don’t get your hopes up, but you do get a jetpack for the zero-g areas so that should get hold you by till you get it, it’s quite fun to zoom about with it and makes the zero-g parts a lot more fun.

Now we all know that I don’t think that the Dead Space series is anything like a survival horror, but what is a good survival horror? Well Dead Space is a good one with a few changes, for starters the enemies need to be more daunting, the necro could look totally disgusting and be several buildings tall, but it won’t frighten you if you can easily chop it to pieces. 

Another thing that could be changed is the store system, at no point should you be able to buy ammunition, the whole idea of a survival horror is that sure, you have bullets, but not a whole lot of bullets and it takes a few to take out the monsters, so it’s best to sneak round and save what ammo you can. This idea is blown out of the water when you can buy ammunition when you run low, survival horror is all about the stress, so when you remove the stress of saving bullets, the horror just isn’t as effective as it could be.

“But what about the new fangled multiplayer!?” I hear you cry? Well I’ve yet to truly try it out properly and what I have was confusing and most certainly not newbie friendly, so we’ll be ignoring that, but if I ever do try out the multiplayer a bit more I’ll be sure to write about it at some point. 

Or we could do some Dark Souls…Yeah Dark Souls sounds a lot better.

Dead Space - Terror? What terror?

Dead Space is a 3^rd person Resident evil 5 style shooter, sci-fi survival horror where you play as Isaac Clark, an engineer that is part of a team sent on a rescue mission to the USG Ishimura after receiving a mayday signal, the mission goes awry the moment it starts trapping the team on the ship after their own is destroyed. Worse still are the monsters that roam the metal halls, wearing the flesh of the dead crew, but amongst all of this Isaac searches for his girlfriend Nicole, a medical officer who took a tour upon the Ishimura when all of this happened.

Now before I start reviewing this sucker, let’s have a quick excerpt of how it is to play Dead Space.

“Doot de doot, oh scary music time must be a necro around, ah there he is the strange dead body on the floor, give me a sec whilst I fire up the death ray *SHAZAM*……right lets oooh look the most difficult enemy in the game! *SHAZAM* right let’s get going”

And that is pretty much how your Dead Space experience will be, Dead Space a sci fi Surival Horror game, suffers from 2 things, theres no survival nor horror! Now while it sounds like I hate the game, I actually quite like it, it’s just a shame that it suffers from a few problems, so we’ll get through the bad and then on with the good.

Now for a survival horror game, there is very little survival and very little horror, since you pretty much trip over ammo and health packs that there is very little need to conserve what you pick up, hell most of the money you use to buy upgrades, is gotten from selling the stuff you don’t need and boy is there a lot. The horror isn’t effective either, well during the first 5mins you will crap yourself, but only because you have no weapon and your new to all the tricks that Dead Space uses, after 30mins in however you will be immune to all the shock tactics used, because they are repeated again and again throughout the entire game. Another very big problem is that the weapons are not balanced for a survival horror experience, the first weapon you pick up can easily kill anything, so the stronger weapons makes a complete mockery of the game, with the strongest enemy becoming a complete pushover.

Now for the good, for starters the monsters in Dead Space look fantastic, necromoprhs (not to be confused with Xenomorphs) are essentially amalgamations of dead human bodies transformed due to an alien life form, this has been used to completely change the shape of the human body, with arms being turned into scything blades, ribs and skin into wings and even multiple bodies fused together to form creatures many times the size of Isaac. And because of this they aren’t easily killed with normal weapons and so have to be cut into pieces before they die, this brings up strategy, cut off the head and it can’t see you, cut off the legs and its forced to crawl, of course all of this depends on the monster you face. 

Another thing that’s great is the UI in the game, all of it has been designed so that it will appear on or near the character, but in a way that makes sense for the character using it, health appears as a bar on the spine of Isaac to show others his general health, when aiming a little hologram shows his remaining ammo, a map appears in front of him allowing him to see where he is and when contacted, his wrist display will create a hologram showing the face of the speaker. None of this gets in the way of the game and it makes sense in universe as well.

The audio is exceedingly creepy and by using this special feature called Fear Emitter they can actually have the music can creepier and creepier the closer you get towards the monsters, sadly this is over used and essentially becomes a kind of radar of how close the bad guys are.

This game while it has its flaws, has an excellent story, imaginative bad guys and fantastic UI design, I would certainly recommend playing it, but if you’re looking for scares, this aint the game for you.