Dead Space : PS3
Coming off the back of Aliens vs. Predator, I wanted to play something similarly dark and scary; a lot of people had told me that Dead Space was pretty much the scariest thing out there, so a few quid later and off I go. I’ll say it here so it’s nice and clear; Dead Space isn’t even close to as frightening as AvP. The problem is that the zombie-type alien nasties you fight in Dead Space are so generic as to be irrelevant. Sure, there’s some good atmosphere and some excellent lighting, but I never felt scared of the bad guys like I did of the Aliens.
Once I’d settled into the idea that I wasn’t going to get the same heart-stopping fear as the other game though, I started to play Dead Space for itself and forget about trying to compare it and what a pleasurable experience that was. The first thing to impress is the HUD. Yes, I know, the boring interface isn’t normally something to write home about, but this HUD is incredible. It’s a holographic projection projected from the character himself which is relevant to him (in third person view) rather than you (the gamer), thus if you spin the camera, it spins the HUD too and you can actually look at your inventory from the back. This might not seem as world-shattering as all that but it does such a lot to keep you in the feel of the game and not remove you to some abstract menu system. Using the menu doesn’t pause the game or stop the bad guys from getting you, it’s all integrated into the game and thus you can be stabbed through the back while taking a quick look at the map and it all appears nicely on the screen. I was so impressed!
The gameplay is similarly good. The fighting is easy to learn but you have to be quite tight to be perfect at it. The bad guys are all defeated faster if you dismember them rather than just pumping shots into their chest, so this appeals to my accurate-sniper nature in these things and I took great pride in being able to take the arms off a violent zombie from across a room; hey, it may not be a skill I take out with me into the real world, but it’s damned good fun here! There’s a decent array of weapons and a harsh upgrade system which means there is no way you can just upgrade everything and be done, but you actually have to choose how to spend your limited upgrade resources (there’s actually an achievement for upgrading all kit and I tell you now it is impossible to do on a single run through of the game - there just aren’t the resources) and this leads nicely into you selecting a couple of favoured weapons. Personally I liked the saw gun thing as it had a certain level of efficiency which appealed. Vruuuum.
The layout of the ship (your environment for 90% of the game) is great and you get to learn it in your head as you track back and forth along the corridors. It’s nice when late in the game you find yourself in the same section that you started in, almost nostalgic. There’s no random respawning here either, which is lovely, so once something is dead, it’s dead and you can begin to trust your safe zones which is very important in a game where things come out of the walls to kill you. The graphics are lovely and you really feel that you are in that ship out in space. During some sections you get to go into oxygen-free environments and the way the sound is affected by this is absolutely wonderful, creating a real sense of abstract peace which isn’t broken even by the advance of violent monsters which you shoot down in silence. There are anti-gravity sections too, which are equally impressive as you jump from floor to wall to ceiling and back. All in all, the level design and environment design is very well crafted indeed.
Twelve or so hours in and Dead Space is completed. There’s a drive to go back and play again on ‘impossible’ and also to run through to try to get a full weapon upgrade, so there’s life in the game yet. Dead Space 2 is on the horizon, and where I got this one late in its lifecycle for a few quid in the secondhand shop, I’m happy to aim for the sequel in full-price glory on release day. Once of the comparisons I felt with Aliens vs. Predator was that you don’t know who the bad guys are and there is no sense of history or story loyalty, well, this is well in place by the end and you are looking forward to seeing how the story continues in the next one - maybe that alone will make it a little more frightening, we’ll see. All in all though, a great game which deserves a place on the shelf of any gamer who likes the genre, definitely an in the dark, on your own sort of thing though.
