Game a Day: Dead Space

In the hopes of getting a lot of the nonsense rattling around my head out into some kind of record I am starting what I hope can be a daily blog about one of the bunch of games I always have running.

Dead Space first hit my radar over a year ago in the pages of Game Informer (the single best overall gaming mag out there). The graphic design of the game leapt off the screen shot loaded pages and I knew this was a game I needed to play.

The setup for the game is nothing new, a rescue team is sent out to investigate radio silence from a massive "planet cracking" spaceship and havoc ensues, seperating the player character Issac (the engineer) from his shipmates. Borrowing heavily from the influences of Alien, The Thing and Resident Evil 4, Dead Space improves on some of its sources in areas while taking two steps back in others. In the holy trinity of gameplay, visuals, and plot, Dead Space manages a 1 1/2 out of 3.
Visually it has moments of stunning dreadful beauty, where the claustrophobic linear progress of bland metal-grated corridors will suddenly open up on a massive chasm in the ships bowels, or force the player into the vacuum of space on the ship's exterior.
The gameplay is RE4 sped up, with the same tank controls but a slightly more nimble protagonist and a camera butted up tight to the leads shoulder. Dominating the frame with the main character forces tension in the player mechanically making it harder to see what threats may lurk just off screen. The "dismemberment" aspect of the gameplay creates a diversionary method of playing, forcing the player to avoid the normal aim-for-the-head approach and rather cut the limbs off the enemies in order to stop them. While this forces a different method of play initially, again it is a mechanical method of creating tension, relying on hampering the player's abilities rather than innovating. In between skirmishes with varying creatures, the player is sent on seemingly endless "errand" quests of the "go there find this fix that" variety. while the gameplay is passable and the visuals often gorgeous, the story is laughably bad.

Cut off from the survivors of his crew, Issac meanders about the monolithic planet cracking ship, following directions from holo-projected crew-mates as they shock/horror! discover various technical issues plaguing the ship beside the mutant killers running around. Strangely enough this issues are only discovered one at a time, further reinforcing the heavily linear aspect of the game. At one point, one of the support characters even states how ridiculous it is for these things to keep happening, a moment guaranteed to break any immersion.

While Dead Space does a have a few genuine "scare's",it loses any emotional cohesion with its by the numbers plot. In terms of pure visual design the game is a triumph, something apparent from those first screenshots so long ago, but this is truly a game made of style over substance.