For the first game in a new franchise, it’s surprising how few new ideas Dead Space owns. Rather than defining its own rules, it concerns itself with polish and refinement – borrowing from others but implementing them into its own fiction. However by the end, all of its ideas are repeated and worn out and a few more would have gone a long way.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been fixated on Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 for a good few weeks now and haven’t familiarized myself with the genre lately but the immediacy of the weapons in Dead Space is excellent. A short introduction that attempts to establish the premise and characters concludes with you being chased unarmed by a necromorph, the aliens you eventually acquaint yourself with. Although this slow pacing could have been developed upon further and eeked some more horror scares whilst you’re in a vulnerable state, it’s still satisfying to find your first tool-gun and dismember a slowly descending necromorph, limb by twisted limb.
Without this unique approach to combat the game would have been lacking; had you been aiming a single cursor and firing a standard weapon (as in Resident Evil 4 and Shadows of the Damned) the game would have been too derivative, too unimaginative but the dismemberment system truly elevates Dead Space’s gameplay. These unconventional weapons, mining tools apparently, allow you to strike enemies tactically and exactly. Discovering which weapons work best in dealing with certain enemies is one of the game’s hidden joys though enemies aren’t varied enough. There are necromorphs with weak-spots that explode, ones that crawl and raise three tentacles before spitting their own projectiles; these are unique in design and demand on the player’s approach. On the other hand, there are those that are too human in form and simply require you to take out their arms and legs. For a ten to twelve hour game, facing this basic form of enemy so frequently, especially when they’re made arbitrarily tougher later on, becomes unexciting.
Adding more enemy variety wouldn’t have fixed all of Dead Space’s problems though. Mechanically the game is without fault with controls that are perfectly judged and a HUD that’s so seamlessly integrated, the action is never intruded upon. Health bars and ammo counts are grounded into the environment so you’re given the full spectacle of the Sci-Fi setting. Together with the absence of loading times within levels, pacing could have been manipulated so effortlessly. Indeed the sound design is particularly worthy of admiration and initially it keeps you on your toes though later through the game, repeated audio cues fall flat in raising the pulse.
It’s the structure of objectives and encounters throughout the game that creates a formulaic experience for a genre that is anything but. You’re often asked to make it to a location to flick a switch or repair a connection to progress the story though the stepping stones of encounters eventually repeat. Rooms lock and necromorphs spawn in, tank-like enemies are thrown into larger areas you return to and those deformed presumed dead, leap up with an extravagant sound sting. It’s horror by numbers and forces the game to rely more on the solidity of its gunplay. Dead Space does attempt to break the mould with puzzles that take place in zero-gravity. However, flicking a switch or carrying item A to put in slot B isn’t too fun or demanding when you’re on the ceiling either. Valve puzzles they are not.
Dead Space is a good game though and certainly an enjoyable experience however it’s a 10-12 hour journey that really should have been 7-9 hours. The fiction seems well realised, if some of the locations don’t seem like ones people would use but the story is too generic or unmemorable to experience again (you’re saying the lady who accuses everyone of being untrustworthy is actually a traitor herself?!!). The game does incentivise multiple play-throughs and the upgrade system is good enough to encourage that, if not living up to the standards Resident Evil 4 set. However I didn’t bother and now I’m moving onto an entirely different game, Yakuza 3 before I even tackle the second iteration in this series, such is the numbing of its re-use and implementation of ideas. If EA want the franchise to become one that can sell 5-million units per game, as CEO John Riccitiello recently claimed, it’s going to need to work for it.
