User Review : Dead Space

Dead Space Review

Dead space is a new intellectual property, however Electronic Arts have done a lot to make it broader than the game itself. There have been comic books to download, a full length animated prequel movie, and various website features. Which if the player was interested, make this game into a movie sequel or game of a comic book rather than just a brand new bare-naked game thrust out into the world.

The story is set in a future where man has colonised the stars. The setting is the Aegis system far from Earth. A mining ship called the Ishimura has lost communication and your character is part of a team sent out to investigate and help with repairs. On board the USG Kellion are Captain Hammond, a scientist/engineer called Kendra, your character an engineer named Isaac Clarke and two red-shirts ready to die at the first sign of trouble.

The Ishimura, which is a huge ship designed for ripping huge continent sized chunks out from the surface of planets, is blacked out when the heroes arrive. The landing goes very badly seeing the Kellion crash land into the docking bay. The ship is at first deserted, however it does not take long for monsters to crawl from the air ducts and start ripping the red-shirts to shreds. The story unfolds over 12 chapters or levels.

The core of the story revolves around an artefact called the marker, which was found on the planet and brought up to the Ishimura. The crew then exhibited signs of increasing insanity and eventually the dead began coming back to life in mutilated forms and killing the rest of the crew. As the playing field stands at the start of the game it’s three living humans against a thousand mutilated corpse-killing machines. The ship is being filled with organic material, with occasional screaming mutilated corpses hanging from the walls. The atmosphere is being changed for an unknown purpose. Hell in space is the setting for this game.

The heroes primarily want to escape the nightmare death trap, however along the way they are forced into learning more and more about what is going on. What force powers the marker, is it alien, why are the dead rising, using organic matter like clay to form new horrific perversions. The game portrays various sides in the run up to the disaster, govenrment / military tensions with a religion called unitology which seems to have a strong following amonst the Ishimura’s crew. Unitology is a cult centred around an indiviual called Altman who believes that an alien artefact was found on Earth and covered up by the government. The Unitologists believe that the marker is a sign from God and that they will have to die to ascend. This leads to some disturbing finds for the player during the game.

The story wears a lot of its influences on its sleeve, Event Horizon, The Thing etc. It also has it’s own identity. The plot would probably make a reasonably successful movie, and for a game that is quite an achievement.

I felt a little confused by the plot at the end, some of the mysteries are not explained and the player is left to wonder on certain aspects of the marker and the necromorphs. Possibly this is due to the already announced sequel, so letting us know the full nature of the marker might not be prudent. It did leave me scratching my head about Nicole’s motivation in helping Isaac. I have my own theories as to what happened but clarity is missing, again I have to concede that this might be intentional.

The view is third person, with the usual analogue sticks for movement and camera. Issac will hold up his weapon and aim by holding the left trigger and laser sights are used on most weapons. Running is with the left bumper and use is A. Pressing Y brings up an inventory map and objectives screen, which does not pause the game. This can be annoying when you are trying to refuel certain pieces of equipment whilst under attack. Most items reload automatically, however stasis which can be of great use in a crisis needs inventory intervention. Health thankfully has a button dedicated to use it from your inventory.

The map is a 3D affair and can be quite hard to read. Thankfully, and probably for this reason pressing down on the right thumb stick will make Issac consult a form of ship gps which paints a laser line for a second on the floor to point you towards your next objective.

Combat with the necromorphs is mostly weapons based, though Isaac does have a mean stomp and right hook. There are around 8 weapons, from the standard plasma cutter pistol to flame-throwers and rapid fire machine guns. Each has a secondary fire. The plasma cutter is the default weapon and it’s possible to go through the game using it exclusively. This is due to the weapons upgrade system that sees each weapon being fairly under powered to start with and deadly to the necromorphs when powered up. The snag is that you will need to play through the game around three times to power up the weapons. The power ups come in forms of power nodes, which are scattered in lockers around the ship. Therefore there is no easy way to gain the power nodes without playing through the whole game. This is made easier by the fact that you can restart with the character from a previous play through and at least have the advantage of your armour and abilities all being fully ranked up.

Upgrades for all equipment consist of putting power nodes into spaces on a grid to link to new abilities. This is done at special upgrade sites dotted around the ship.

Isaac has his armour suit which can be powered up with bigger capacity air tanks and stronger armour. He has kinesis and stasis abililities. Kinesis allows you to pick up free moving objects in the environment and move or hurl them around. Stasis is fired like a weapon and will slow time for objects and monsters hit with the blast for a short period of time. Upgrades to both abilities will allow for longer duration or greater strength of effect.

There is a large variety of enemies, although for the most part the humanoid slasher type will be main foe. There are baby type enemies which come from the clone vats of the ship, tentacles that come from holes in the wall and try and pull you in or crush you. Bat type monsters which transfrom the dead human bodies into necromorph soldiers. Wall mounted tentacled monstrosities that need many tentacles severed to take them down. Scorpion like amalgamations of flesh tend to attack in zero gravitiy environments. Once the military ship enters the story the necromoprhs created from the dead soldiers are harder to kill and faster due to the cybernetic implants that the soldiers possessed.

There are sections of the ship where gravity is either missing or can be turned on and off at will. In other areas damage to the artificial gravity sees areas where sections of floor can smash you into the ceiling if stepped upon. This can be used to lure and kill unsuspecting necromorphs as well as get yourself killed.

In the zero gravity sections you can push off the floor and jump to almost any part of the walls or ceiling. This leads to some disorientating puzzling and fighting.

Puzzles involve the use of stasis to slow fast moving things and kinesis to move objects around. Some of these objects are very large pieces of machinery. For the most part the puzzles are fairly easy to solve and won’t give anyone a headache. There is one puzzle that I found to be totally unintuitive, where you are asked to swap our broken antenna in a huge communications array. The order of the pieces in the puzzle was hinted at, and the combinations many. I ended up looking at a walkthrough to save me half an hour of swapping pieces of the puzzle.

In addition to the gravity problems there are some areas where the ship has been damaged and opened to space. In these areas Isaac’s air supply runs down quickly. There is also an area of the ship open to space and frozen solid which gives a change of look to the corriodors.

The premise of the game lends itself to a repetitive level design with hundreds of corridors and block like rooms. After all this is a working space ship, space is at a premium and nothing is designed with aesthetics in mind. That said the designers have took a boring template and made something, which not actually beautiful to look at like say Prince of Persia is far from dull and repetitive.
The corridors and rooms are plentiful, however, there is also the large glass walled bridge, the hydroponics bay, engine room and medical bay.

The mission objectives serve the story well, and while you may feel that some actions could be make work for game length sake, for the most part everything feels logical. You find yourself, fixing trams and asteroid defence systems, finding the captains codes to access the ship computer, blowing up barricades, refuelling engines, sending and S.O.S. etc.

A particularly good moment sees you enter an area of the ship where another smaller ship has crashed into the side of the Ishimura, here weapons from the small ship have spilled out into the bay. You must clear the radioactive weapons before the smaller ship will let you inside due to the radiation alarm. You have to open the bay to space by breaking the airlock and then get all the weapons outside before your air runs out or the necromorphs get you.

Supplies and ammo are a constant worry, ammo never seems to be enough and you scour the environment for more. Objects are hidden in crates and wall lockers, enemies drop items when they die. You can also sell useless items in the shop and buy ammo or weapons.

Saving is accomplished by the use of wall mounted save points. At first I found this annoying as I sometimes seemed to accomplish a lot only to have it all taken away when I died, I soon learned that although there aren’t that many save points they are usually situated in fairly central areas of the level. This makes it possible to make a quick trip to them before opening a new door or attempting something risky. With this mentality you quickly become a paranoid saver and the problem disappears. While I would prefer to be able to save at any time, this system is adequate once you learn it.

There is some small sections where gameplay changes radically, for example there is a shooting range and a section where you man a gun to shoot incoming asteroids. These are diversions and nothing more, and I am glad they are, too much of a mini game can sour the fun. Here only the asteroid shooting is pertinent to progress.

There are five boss enemies to destroy, each one has it’s weak spots and patterns like most traditional boss battles. The Leviathan midway through the game is a good boss battle and a fairly impressive design as well. The final boss, may be much more traditional, but it does not suffer from that and is great fun and aesthetically pleasing. The remaining bosses leave less of an impression and are of the shoot the weak spot and run away variety. I don’t usually have much love for boss battles and while I was cursing the leviathan until I defeated it I was enjoying myself.

I received 595 achievement points playing on the hard difficulty, which took 16 hours. I was disappointed that the newly unlocked harder difficulty mode sent you back to a basic character. What would have made much more sense was to have your powered up character start a new game on the harder difficulty.

This is what I feel is missing in the games industry, writing which would stand for a fairly decent sci-fi movie. A big effort in the backstory department and solid gameplay, no frills, nothing that innovative, just a well made game that isn’t a sequel or feature a celebrity. Not something trying to be new and innovative, just a solid game.