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Dead Space

EA Redwood Shores

Horror movies get a lot of flak for not being scary or just for employing weak plots and cheap tricks. Perhaps that's why you don't see many horror games. Perhaps the fact that the established few changed massively or that they have deceased lately didn't help the cause. Either way, Redwood Shores tried to break the mold and simply make a horror game set into the dead cold of space. And try they did, and a fine game came out as the result.

About the game

To put it plainly, Dead Space is a survival horror science-fiction third-person shooter. Now, for a genre with 5 words, it may seem intimidating, but it's really not. To put it in less game-oriented terms, Dead Space is a game in which you move around an abandoned (or is it) mining ship with an over the shoulder perspective. Oh, and you get scared sometimes. You also shoot the enemies. While the ideas behind the story or setting aren't particularly novel, what the game sets itself to do does great. You walk, you shoot, you get startled, you survive (or die horribly). You also kill, not by the usual manner, but by dismembering your enemies, unlike the headshot-oriented style of most other shooters.

Starting out

You start the game as Isaac Clarke (no, neither Isaac Asimov, nor Arthur C. Clarke from which he is named), a maintenance engineer who is supposed to repair a broken communications array on the Planet Cracker class mining ship USG Ishimura - a massive starship capable or ripping apart planets piece by piece to extract minerals from them. As a result of such a crack, the personnel on the ship retrieves an artifact known as the Marker, and after a period of dementia, all hell breaks loose among the crew of the ship, alien beings infecting the surface colony that then spreads to the ship via shuttle. If you know a little bit of Latin, the name of "necromorph", the name of the enemies you fight, might imply what it means. Basically it's Space zombies from hell. So you get on the ship after a lengthy and beautiful sequence, along with a crew of 4 others, out of which just you, Kendra Daniels, a female technician, and Zach Hammond, the security officer, survive. These two sprout a heated conflict from the get-go, leaving you and Isaac take comfort only in the heavy thumping of his footsteps.

Going awesome

Going through the game opens up more and more of the story through many collectible video logs, audio logs, text logs, or actions you undertake. Each of these unlocks more back story you read into, and while it may be that the plot is something of Aliens and generic sci-fi movie A combined, it still is intriguing through the unique twist the necromorphs take. Killing these enemies entails the use of varied mining equipment, ranging from your trusty plasma cutter, to the contact beam, the only proper military weapon being the gauss rifle. Going through the game you obtain commodities such as ammunition, health, oxygen and whatnot, along with the only way to upgrade weapons - power nodes. To upgrade a weapon or your suit, make sure you have power nodes, and use them to unlock more of the power grid of the respective weapon or system. You eventually obtain two special powers: stasis, which is used to slow down units to a crawl helping you take aim easier at harder foes, and kinesis, used less intensively as something of a lesser gravity gun, but it fits it's purpose. Its primary target though it puzzle solving, and that's always fun. Every weapon you buy has a unique second mode, in which for example the plasma cutter rotates 90 degrees, the flamethrower sets fire traps, as well as melee attacks. Considering, every weapon feels appropriately powerful, with intense feedback that makes you comfortable with using just one weapon the whole game. Isaac's curb stomp is one of the most satisfying in gaming history in my opinion. Also prevents shorter necromorphs from chewing on your knee caps.

Atmosphere - Spooky!

There is a certain sense in Dead Space that you don't get everywhere else. The feeling of immersion in the game is incredible, and one part of this has to be the lack of a traditional HUD. Everything you would traditionally see as a HUD is actually part of your RIG (Resource Integration Gear), a device attached to your spine so as to track both position and physical status. You see the current health on the spine, quantity of oxygen remaining in the tank in the back of a neck, and you don't even get to see the amount of ammo you have in your gun in the traditional way. It's an overlay on the gun. Also, you don't have crosshairs, but it never becomes a problem, since the laser beams more than make up for it. You get to go through many areas of the ship and later the colony, and while it has the usual metal blandness, the different lighting and feeling makes up for it, making you see vacuum as a brighter world with a terrible loss of color, almost making you feel that it's cold, or dark places with rotting corpses as rancid. Had computers had the ability to reproduce smell, it would most likely smell as well as it makes you feel. You are always kept on your toes by ominous voices in the background, ranging from crew whispering ship details to creepy songs of Twinkle, twinkle, little star, as well as the feeling that Necromorphs would pop up from each and every hole you may see, and sometimes places you wouldn't ever expect. Startles are galore in the game, so expect them first time you play the game. Difficulty also plays a part in the atmosphere of the game. Playing on harder difficulties brings out the survival horror aspect of the game a lot, finding less ammo, and flailing your weapon around while Necromorphs slash your body apart.

Graphics - Gross, at times

Dead Space features incredible graphics. It would be enough said, but it won't do the game justice. It looks beautiful from the first frame, when your ship approaches the Ishimura, and although you don't get such panoramic shots for a while afterwards, the Necromorph models take the show. Apparently the guys that made the game created these enemies to look anatomically correct, from the point of view of the gore that flies around. You can see muscle and bone, bleeding and looking as if you saw a man under the scalpel. It looks as disturbing as it should, at times exaggerated, but not more over the top than how it may should be. Isaac doesn't posses super-human power, although he does have a super-cool curb stomp, and all animation you get to see of him shows him that way. He seems human when shuffling in his suit, looking around, fiddling with his weapon when idle, or walking around in his heavy work boots that change with armor. Every little detail is noted, and so Isaac is easy to relate to, despite him not having an actual voice in the game.

Stomping to conclusions

Dead Space is a masterpiece game - A-class movie quality in a bug-free package. This is seriously the most bug-free game I've ever seen. Sure there are a few flailing corpses due to the HAVOK physics engine, but otherwise it's pretty much flawless. It is one of those games you think fondly of after you finish it, and one of those games that you know needs a movie made after it. There is an Anime prequel to this game, and it's ok, but a true motion-picture movie would do the game much more justice.

The only gripe I may have with Dead Space now is the fact that it felt a little bit too short. While it's nothing short of awesome, 10 or 11 hours aren't really enough to truly enjoy the horror cockpit of the Ishimura.