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.