Sitting somewhere at the crossroads of System Shock 2, Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime is Dead Space – a dark sci-fi shooter that clocks in at a perfect 12 hours, which is just about the point that I am ready to call the game completed. Dead Space takes the third person perspective and controls of Resident Evil 4, the setting and basic story premises of System Shock 2 and the UI of Metroid Prime and creates a very well balanced blend that is a fantastic game from start to finish.

In Dead Space, you play as Isaac, fighting your way through a derelict mining station, fending off the infected crew members and trying to make sense of what happened, while trying to stay alive. The infected crew members will take many forms, but all can be blown away through the weapons that you find and buy. The weapon variety is pretty good, but I did feel that most of the weapons weren’t really that effective – the only weapons I consistently used from start to finish were the Plasma Cutter and Line Gun. The Flamethrower, Pulse Rifle and others were only useful in a pinch, which most often happened when I found myself out of ammo for my preferred guns.

Throughout the game, you can upgrade these weapons through an interesting, yet annoying, interface. You find power nodes that you use at work benches to upgrade your gear. Each item (which includes your special modules and armor suit) has a grid based system, with many nodes representing an upgrade to the item’s armor, damage, capacity, duration, health or other appropriate statistics. As you unlock nodes, more nodes become available. However, due to the layout of the grids, there was little advantage in taking certain routes, as it all intermingles frequently. There is no ‘high damage’ route or ‘high capacity’ route for weapons. The most annoying thing about this whole system is how many nodes simply do nothing but unlock other nodes. I often found myself in a position where I had to waste a node just so the next node would be useful.

The story is told through audio logs, text logs and video logs that you find scattered about, along with cut scenes that you can witness, Half-Life style. These logs do a good job of conveying the events that lead up to the infection, and the cut scenes that you are involved in do a good job of showing events that you go through. Very, very rarely do you lose control of the character, which was a good move on the developer’s part. The story is decent to slightly better than decent throughout most of the game, with an odd, but not in a good way, sequence of events at the end. Luckily, the story was not why I was still playing, so I could happily not care less about that weird shift.

The reason I was still playing was the solid controls and camera – which is the reason I continue playing most games that I enjoy. My initial thought on the camera was not good, but once I got used to it, it became just an extension of me, which is just the way I like it. I don’t like playing a game where I find myself fighting the camera or the character to get my command to be recognized properly, and after about an hour, Dead Space felt great. When I told Isaac to aim and shoot, he aimed and shot. When I told the camera to spin right or go up, it went where I told it. In addition to that, there is a brilliant waypoint system in this game that I fully encourage other developers to steal. Simply push in the right thumb stick, and a glowing blue line guides you to your next location. This game is not about exploration or puzzle solving, so this mechanic kept the game moving in the direction it should go – straight to the next combat. The only time the controls ever got a bit wonky was during the zero gravity scenes. You aimed in a certain direction and hit Y to jump, and once you landed, your sense of orientation gets pretty quickly messed up. “The enemy’s gate is down,” indeed.

My biggest complaint with the game lies in the enemy AI. They are brainless and only difficult because you have to aim for the limbs. The ‘aim for the limbs’ concept is pretty aggravating. When an enemy is moving fast with narrow limbs flailing about, and the only way I can do appreciable damage is to dismember a limb, I feel cheated. It feels like a complete artificial difficulty boost. Rather than making the AI smarter or doing something that makes sense, biologically, it is a very artificial difficulty that I could have done without.

In the end, I really enjoyed the game. The 12 hour mark was a great time to end the game, and I actually considered playing a second time through. You end the game with only one or two weapons actually boosted up to significant power, so running through a second time would give me a chance to boost the power on other weapons and hopefully make them viable. With solid controls and camera, a decent story and waypoint system that keeps the action flowing, I would recommend Dead Space. The similarities to System Shock 2 are a bit overwhelming, but not in a bad way, as I feel it does stand on its own as a good game.

In my first impressions of Dead Space, I was not thrilled with what seemed to be an overly heavy System Shock 2 influence. Now that I’ve put more time into it (around 6 hours at this point), Dead Space has come into its own and that influence, while still there, is no longer overbearing and bordering the rip-off category. In fact, many of the complaints I had during my first impressions (stasis module feeling out of place, upgrade system feeling out of place, lack of horror elements, nothing really original) aren’t completely valid anymore. While I still agree on all of those points, they have taken the back burner to what has shaped up to be a solid third person shooter.

At this point, the game feels somewhat like Resident Evil 4 meets System Shock 2 meets Metroid Prime. It is a good blend of three games I highly enjoyed – the controls and camera of Resident Evil 4, the setting of System Shock 2 and the combat speed and minimalistic UI of Metroid Prime. While it retains none of the horror of Resident Evil 4 or System Shock 2, I no longer feel like the game is trying to scare me.

The controls felt quite solid after about an hour, and now they feel nice and fluid. It doesn’t try to do a complex control scheme, and by keeping the scope minimal and focusing on getting each aspect right, they left you with a game where I really feel in control of my character. I’ve not had an incident since the first thirty minutes where I felt like I was fighting to get my character or camera into the position I wanted, which lets me just focus on moving around, taking aim, and fighting enemies.

The combat is still a bit on the frustrating side. At times, I feel like I am simply overwhelmed by enemies and my biggest adversary is simply moving the reticule into place to fire at an enemy – but I can only deal significant damage if I target the limbs. In a frenetic battle, I’ll often miss several shots, wasting precious times, and get overwhelmed due to this artificial difficulty booster of forcing me to aim for the limbs. That difficulty is magnified with the pretty useless weapon selection. I have four weapons at the moment – Plasma Cutter, Line Gun, Flamethrower, Pulse Rifle – and only the first two of those are even moderately usable. The flamethrower seems to do incredibly little damage, and the precision of the pulse rifle makes hitting flailing limbs almost impossible. The plasma cutter and line gun have a very wide blade they fire, which makes it easier to hit flailing limbs, and I just switch back and forth depending on how quickly I need to kill a target. I prefer the plasma cutter most of the time, but mainly use line gun against multiple targets, since the particularly wide blade lets me often take down two limbs at a time.

The infected mining station concept does feel a bit stale, but not overtly so – and I’m giving it some credit considering I played inFAMOUS and Prototype just prior to Dead Space, and both are infection stories that released after Dead Space. This infection story is pretty generic – still very reminiscent of System Shock 2, but it is enjoyable enough that I do pick up audio logs whenever I see them. Had they forced me to watch a ton of cutscenes where I lose control of the character, I’m sure I would’ve stopped playing by now. They did a good thing in never taking control of the character from you, in the same way that Half-Life did.

I am enjoying this game, and due to the short length (which I fully appreciate) I may even finish it (a rare event). I’m interested enough in the story to keep going, but not interested enough to watch cutscenes. As long as they let me keep control at all times, they can keep me to the end. I just wish I could get a better weapon, preferably something that can do significant damage with a body shot.

I recently got my hands on a copy of Dead Space and have put a little less than an hour into the game, and am coming away with really mixed thoughts. When I first popped the game in and toyed with the opening menus, I was immediately reminded of Metroid Prime with the menu style and design choices.  I started up a game on medium and after the opening scene I was ready to begin my journey through Dead Space. Before my hour was up, not only did I feel that Metroid Prime influenced the menu style, but I feel the game was extremely heavily influenced by System Shock 2 – almost a bit too much.

I really like the UI and think EA did a great job at coming up with a creative UI that I had not scene before. In one sense, there is absolutely no UI, but you still manage to get all of the information that you need. All of the popup menus are displayed as a hologram infront of the character, so there is nothing showing up that you see as a player, but your character would not be seeing. It makes the HUD feel minimalistic, yet thorough, which I dig.

The camera bothered me at first, but I think that may have been due to the very close in environment that you start in, and once you leave the crashed ship and get into the mining facility, it eases up a bit and by the time I put the game down after an hour, the camera and controls felt solid, if generic.

The most major thing that is detracting from the game for me is the ‘aim for the limbs’ tactic you have to employ against enemies. As a game that skims the survival horror genre, Dead Space uses enemy combat as a fear factor, and ensures the fights are difficult to keep them scary. I, for one, am not scared by this game in the slightest, and feel that the ‘aim for the limbs’ tactic is an incredibly cheap way of artificially hardening the game. Rather than making a smarter AI, they just make it harder to kill by having you aim for the limbs.

The last thing that I noticed during my initial hour on this game was the disconnected feel between certain elements and the game as a whole. For instance, the game as a whole is a high tech shooter, but the stasis module feels very different and feels more like magic than technology. With not even the slightest attempt to explain why, I am simply led to believe that this stasis module can slow down time on any object it connects with. My suspension of disbelief is strained a bit every time I fire this weapon. It is also strained by the ‘aim for the limbs’ tactic, since that defies basic biology, and the weapon upgrade system. That weapon upgrade system behaves like the sphere grid from Final Fantasy X, an unabashed fantasy RPG. It almost feels like it’s not sure what it wants to be and just slaps together elements from other games.

My final thoughts at this time are that this game is a pretty generic shooter that just stole formula elements from other games and mashed them together. The mashup is a fairly seamless one, but the lack of anything original and new (except maybe the UI, unless I just skipped whichever game it stole that from) feels like true EA.