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DEAD SPACE Posted by Dan Pearson on Oct 22, 2008 14:31 (Oct 22, 2008 14:31) |
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Dead Space is EA’s answer to the survival horror genre, but is this a bore fest or as Garth Merenghi would say a “balls to the wall horror”.
Dead Space starts you off on board a small space ship with the rest of your crew, you are Isaac Clarke and you are about to dock with the USG Ishimura, a huge planet cracker, which is used to mine large amount of minerals from the planets below. After a crash landing on the Ishimura the game starts in earnest, you and your team get split up and then all hell breaks loose. Something has happened to the thousand plus crew of the ship and strange unknown beings are attacking you form every angle. It’s up to you to keep you cool and try to get off this floating hell hole.
 Dead Space has a third person over the shoulder perspective, yes it’s just like Res 4 but it works really well. Controls are very simple and any fan of survival horror will feel right at home, LS moves you around, RS looks around, hold L1 to aim and R1 to fire, unlike many other survival games the melee attacks work really well, you have R1 to punch and R2 to stomp with your foot, whilst its possible to take out an enemy with a melee it is really only used for a quick slap and run effect or a final bone crunching head stomp on a downed enemy.
There are so many areas to this game that it makes it head and shoulders above other survival horrors. From the screenshots you can see the coloured spine, if this depletes its game over, each weapon also has an ammo counter which allows you to keep an eye on your ever depleting ammo. The menus are simply a design masterpiece, each one is presented on screen in real time 3D as if they were projected from your suit, the maps and inventory menu’s are easily navigated whilst you move about. The audio and video files that you can collect can be watched as you move around, move the camera around and you can watch the video from behind, pointless but great design none the less.
The horror element is of vital importance in this game and it thankfully the game catches this feeling right from the start and never lets go throughout the entire experience, whilst the monsters are freakish and scary (they have similarities to John Carpenters The Thing), its nothing compared to the great lighting and atmospheric soundtrack. I got more scared in the silent flicking light areas and was grateful when a monster jumped out so I could just fill the room with the familiar sound of machine gun fire.
With the amount of enemies trying to rip you apart you will be grateful that you have a cool selection of weapons available, your basic cutter, flamethrower, machine gun and a few others that I won’t mention so as not to spoil the surprise, each is upgradable as is the suit you wear, enabling you to carry more items and gain better health. You can change weapons with the press of the d-pad which makes altering your attack or defence very easy. On top of that there are a few other abilities on offer that assist with the puzzle element of the game including a power-up that slows down machinery and a kind of gravity gun that can pick and throw objects.
 If you have horror, you also need blood and guts and this game has loads, it’s on the walls and floors of most rooms, there are cadavers, torsos and limbs strewn about giving the impression that something really bad has happened. Even the way you dispose of the enemies is gruesome, take out as many limbs as possible to slow them down, then they will eventually die, spurting blood all over the place.
I am a huge fan of horror films like the Alien series and Event Horizon and this game makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Dead Space has done to space horror what Resident Evil done to zombie flicks, this is really a great horror game and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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