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.