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Sunday, October 19, 2008 |
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Dead Space
By admin @ 7:29 PM :: 2536 Views ::  :: 360, PS3
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To be honest, I've been ignoring most of the Dead Space talk since it was first announced by Electronic Arts some months (years?) ago. It's something that is a bigger deal internally at EA than it would be for gamers. EA isn't really known for its survival horror genre releases, so they probably sat around high-fiving each other and talking up how X-Treme and Fierce it was for them to go with an M rated horror title. They tried to convey as much in their weekly press announcements showcasing what Dead Space was to be about. But really... Who cares? Either the game is going to come out great, or it's gonna stink ass. I waited until the reviews came in, and then bought my copy, expecting something good.
Well... The truth is, if you're not a guy who plays PC games, this might feel fresh and new to you. Unfortunately, I've played a great deal of PC games, and all of this felt like a big rehash of stuff I've seen before in other games. Basically, in Dead Space, you are part of a team of repairmen, on a space ship, that is about to dock with a much larger spaceship that is in distress. The larger ship is a "Planet Cracker" which is lingo for a ship that pulls chunks of planets into itself and breaks down the material into usable ore. Sort of like an advanced mining operation. Also, your girlfriend Nicole is on this ship, and she sent you a message saying how sorry she was for sleeping with another repairman. (No, she doesn't say that, but she does go on about being sorry, so I guess you have some emotional connection to her, even though you never speak in the game and might as well be a robot for all it matters.) Once onboard, you realize that something has gone wrong and the majority of the inhabitants of the ship have been killed off. Is your girlfriend dead? You don't know, but the way these games end up you'll probably see her butchered, betray you, or die while activating the reactor core overload than you'll ever get the chance to see her walk out the airlock with you. Otherwise, what is left on-board is human like creatures that attack you and your friends (Well, you assume your friends are getting attacked, since you never actually see them in a fight. They just annoy you with instructions via pop-up vid screens.) The monsters have the usual array of claws, teeth, arm spears, and acid spray. Most of which you've seen in other games. A good way to think of the story line is a mix between the movies Event Horizon and John Carpenter's The Thing with a splash of Gears of War thrown in for good measure.
If all of that sounds kind of familiar to you, it might be if you've played one or more of the following games in the past couple years...
Prey. Which had you get transported up to a space ship to fight aliens that were doing experiments on humans, while you do the zero gravity boot thing, all the while looking for your girlfriend.
Doom 3. Instead of a space ship, you're on a moon base fighting the undead demons that killed everyone off as they blabber insanities at you.
The Thing was a remake of the movie and had crappy control, but it did the whole mad research science team thing.
Alpha Prime had you on a planet mining colony looking for your girlfriend while robots and people were trying to kill you. (And frankly had a better story than all the aforementioned titles.)
There's probably more that I could name off, this was just off the top of my head. So as far as story-line goes, I felt like I'd been here a million times over. And just wasn't impressed. I feel like if you're going to do adventure horror, you should at least make the story interesting. Here it just felt like one of two possible outcomes.
A. Miners find alien race, aliens kill miners.
B. Miners find alien race, government runs experiments with mad doctor, experiments go out of control, aliens kill miners.
It's always that or a variation of the two. The promo videos show all the killing going on while "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..." plays in the background as though to scare you into thinking this game is really hardcore and brutal since it mixes children's songs with arm spears being put to use. Horrifying! I was waiting for the second reel to start with Sammy Davis Jr's "The Candy Man" to start playing as the hero (Who wears a mask that looks like a slashed glowing pickle bucket) walks through the game slicing hunks of meat off monsters.
Ok, so anyway, my displeasure with the marketing and story line removed. What is the overall game play like? Well it's a third person over-the-shoulder viewpoint (Like Gears of War) in-which you have an arsenal of weapons that you use to blast limbs off the creatures. A shot to the face doesn't bring down the critters, but blowing off a limb or two does the job. Your arsenal features a variety of weapons used to dismember opponents. They are all fun to use the first 5 times or so, but then when you start using the hovering disc blade weapon for the 40th time against the same monster you killed 39 times earlier, it starts to wear thin.
It appears the developers knew the combat would be a problem, and opted to dress it up by giving you special powers to slow an object's (Or creature's) speed, or use telekinesis to move objects like Darth Vader fighting Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. Except Darth Vader did it better since he could make all kinds of stuff fly around, while here in Dead Space there are only a few select items that you can move and most get hung up on walls and corners, meanwhile the monsters are sawing through your spinal cavity looking for marrow. So you spend most of your time ignoring these features (Unless a puzzle presents itself, like a large obstacle blocking your way, which you can move by telekinesis rather than just blowing it up with your Black-N-Decker arsenal of weaponry.) and concentrate on just surviving by mowing everything down in front of you.
There are a couple attempts at a boss battle puzzle solution situation, areas where you can only run to escape being killed, and a small section where you use the ship's guns to shoot asteroids. But overall, the game play is linear and largely uneventful. If the monsters didn't jump out at you in surprise you would probably get really bored with this game really quick. Luckily the direction juiced up the scary segments to the gills, so that you constantly have a sense of dread about what might be lurking around the next corner. This helps keep the game moving, because the missions don't leave much for the imagination to stay interested otherwise.
Like, to give you an example, you arrive on the ship and become separated from two members of your team. These people communicate with you and say things like, "Ok I need you to go to engineering and flip a switch." Then when you do that they say, "Ok, I need you to go to Medical and stir some stuff together" Then when you do that they say, "Now I need you to do three things for me, first go get an old tire. You'll find that in the basement. Then you'll need a patch. So you'll have to fight your way up to the bathroom to get a band-aid. And then finally you'll need to put air in the tire, so you'll have to go to the gas station section and find the pump there." (No that's not a real mission, but the game play is the same as that. You do this over and over and over again.) And on and on and on. You don't get an original thought here. You just follow your orders from point to point, fighting the same monsters as you go.
In fact, the developers designed the levels in such a way that you can't really figure out where the hell you are going. So they included a unique mapping device that draws a line on the ground for you to follow from objective to objective. Seriously, the game knows how linear it is that it even draws a straight line telling you where to go to continue your meat cutting career. Arguably, you can change your objectives, but for what? To go down an empty hallway? Fight more of the same creatures? Find another clip for your gun when you already have 50? Most folks will just follow the line because doing anything else will just cause you to get lost on the ship.
It's not that Dead Space is bad. It's a good weekend waster and if the story-line is new to you, a great deal suspenseful and interesting. But just because they added some tension to it, doesn't mean it's really a great game. They could have tied this game engine to a better (original) story line and added more variety to the action sequences. It felt like it wanted to be at a Bioshock type level of game play, but the story doesn't support it. And that's probably the bummer piece for me. If you're going to do survival horror mixed with action, you should really make the story interesting or the action outstanding. I didn't find either here, so the game comes off as unremarkable.
It's well done in its execution of the things it was supposed to do. The game engine is competent, the action breaks up nicely, no parts are too difficult, puzzles are well laid out, weapons are interesting and varied, and the sound effects and voice acting are outstanding. I just wish I wouldn't have felt like I've been here before. Like that I'm headed towards a climax that is predictable and unremarkable. I think Dead Space delivers a lot of game that a lot of console gamers want. But there are some of us that expected something a bit more original, and Dead Space wasn't it.
8 out of 10. For good game engine, good mechanics, good sound, easy play, good direction, and a polished atmosphere. Negatives include a cookie cutter story, linear game play, and not enough variety. |
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