Game Review: Dead Space 2

Typical outcome: "It's beautifu-OH SHI-!"

It's like being asked if you want to be bit by a rattlesnake a second time: Hey, wanna go up against the necromorphs again? Huh? Do ya? Rawr?

But by the time my copy of Dead Space 2 came in the mail, I was psyched beyond any semblance of a care. I thankfully knew very little about the story, or even what to expect. I knew my mom probably wouldn't like the game very much, but, then again, she's the one who introduced me to The Thing. I was very excited going into this game, with expectations that sat pretty high up there. It would've been very easy for Visceral Games to just rehash the first game (like BioWare, they're a subsidiary of EA), but I was amazed that DS2 pretty much met all of them, and did so with style.

The game's story picks up some three years after the quagmire on the Ishimura, with Isaac Clarke waking up in the psych ward of a hospital, confused and suffering from a severe bout of trauma-induced amnesia. He remembers absolutely nothing since escaping from the Aegis System, but he does remember just enough for him to recognize a necromorph infestation when he sees it. Things just never get better for good ol' Issac.

Barely escaping with his life, Isaac is thrown into absolute chaos, with no other real objective except to survive. As he soon discovers, the place he's currently running around is "The Sprawl": a massive, self-contained city built around a shard of Titan, one of Saturn's presently-pulverized moons. Things are gradually going from bad to superbad, as the necromorph infestation spreads violently throughout the unsuspecting populace. He (and by extension, you) has no idea how the necromorphs appeared here or how to even go about stopping it. Eventually, he comes into contact with several other characters, who shed some light on a conspiracy at the heart of it all, and inform Isaac Clarke of just how f**ked he is.

Without giving too much away, I absolutely loved how the story unfolded in Dead Space 2. Much like its predecessor, it's a slow process of gathering information and just taking a look around, but unlike DS1, this game doesn't even tell you where you are, or why you've woken up in a straight-jacket! It's reminiscent of the mansion from Resident Evil; you're just there, bad things are happening, and it takes some time to figure out what due to the horrible, horrible circumstances. There's a palpable sense of wandering in ignorance at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time - minus the Jill sandwich.

As for the location you wander in ignorance, the Sprawl is pretty much the opposite of the USG Ishimura, in that there are less winding corridors, more open locations (comparable to the Ishimura's bridge area), and many more pretty things to look at. Dead Space was a visually stunning game to me, especially considering that it's just about three years old. Even on the Xbox 360 version, Dead Space 2 looks even better. Everything looks cleaner, the use of light to create mood and tension has been employed more frequently, and the level-design is fantastic.

As before, there are no real loading screens or "cutscenes" in Dead Space 2, only strategically-placed elevators or story moments to distract you from when the game's actually doing its work. The camera never cuts away for the entire game (unless you die), so when shit goes down, it's very unexpected. This also makes the Sprawl feel as massive as it looks, since the entire city was actually designed around the areas you can explore (much like Alan Wake and Mirror's Edge). It feels like a real spacestation, and that's the important part. There are apartment complexes, shopping malls, food courts, a church, sewers, and other spoiler-ific places that you'll be fighting your way through. Some care clearly went into the design of this game if they designed a whole city even though you only play through certain parts.

Click to see just how massive the Sprawl appears.

Overkill? Perhaps, but it makes the experience. (It's an eight hour game spread across two discs, which should give you an idea of how dense this game is!)

So, it's bigger, prettier, and the story expands upon the main plot and the lore in all the right places. But is it fun to play? Well, Visceral Games have clearly charged ahead here with that old mantra in mind: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are many gameplay tweaks that rectify the major hangups that most people had with the first game. The zero gravity sections now allow you to float around them using thrusters, instead of a point-and-click bounce from one room to the other. Isaac is also a little more maneuverable, where he was previously kinda sluggish, which makes a big difference during an attack.

The return of "context-sensitive events" that pop up every now and then was very welcomed. Nothing breaks up expectations like being suddenly flung through space, forced to maneuver your way through debris along the way. They're almost like unique mini-games that you only play once, much like the drag tentacles from DS1. More of that is always nice.

But aside from tweaks and the token addition of weapons and new brands of necromorphs (terrifying, though they are), the gameplay remains largely unchanged from the last game. For better or worse, you're still dismembering necromorphs for eight hours, which gets noticeably repetitive this time through. This wasn't much of a problem in the last game, since getting acquainted with "dismemberment combat" and the necromorphs themselves was half the fun. Not to mention the encounters were more infrequent and set up with a greater sense of subtlety, which just built more tension. This time, you just get swarmed. Every time you feel like you're gonna get swarmed or attacked, you do. Lots of swarming going on.

It would be the equivalent of picking up Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age 2 for the first time and discovering that geth/darkspawn are the prime enemy again, and you're gonna be fighting them exclusively for the whole game again. When it comes to the combat, there's a lot of deja vu going on, and I'm worried that Visceral Games are beginning to back themselves into a corner in that regard. I didn't care for Gears of War 2 because you were just fighting more of the Locust Horde, and I don't much care for Halo because in this rich sci-fi universe Bungie created, the Covenant and their various sects are apparently the only threat to a supersoldier in the entire galaxy.

Variety is the spice of life, Visceral, and making a variety of one type of enemy isn't gonna cut it for Dead Space 3, because it almost didn't work with Dead Space 2. The necromorphs are scary as hell, but so were the zombies in Resident Evil, and you can see what repetition did to those guys. Dead Space 3 needs to be your Resident Evil 4, where you go back to the drawing board and make with the "outside the box" stuff.

So, I guess my main gripe with the game isn't necessarily with the game itself, but with the direction of the franchise overall. You can just see Dead Space there, with its sci-fi universe that I'd seriously rank up there creativity-wise with BioWare's Mass Effect series, teetering on the edge of becoming a series about shooting different kinds of necromorphs in slightly different ways. Once you get swarmed for the billionth time, the scares and the immersion goes away. The opening? That was terrifying. The school? Nightmare-inducing. Getting swarmed again outside the factory? Annoying.

But it says a lot about the general atmosphere, art direction, and story of this game that I'm willing to shoot my way through even more swarms just to play through it again (having New Game+ available doesn't hurt either). It may not do anything particularly daring gameplay-wise, but everything else tries to do what Dead Space did great, and do them even better. In my mind, they succeeded, and they've definitely made a fan out of me. Dead Space 2 is still an amazing, terrifying, and immersive experience worthy of the hard sci-fi genre that it celebrates. If you loved the first game, there should be very little dissuading you from trying out its sequel.

It's a beautiful game, and your mom will hate it.

(Tardy) Game Review: Dead Space

My first experience with the survival/horror genre was Resident Evil 2 on the original Playstation. My family had gone out to a friend's ranch in the middle of nowhere. It was full dark, we were surrounded by orchards, old machinery, and there were coyotes yapping in the distance. Probably my first, intense feeling of isolation, and it was at that magical moment that our friend's son asked me, "Hey, do you want to play some Playstation?" I could not refuse. This was back when the Playstation was this magical, disc-using wonder of a game system. I loved just watching the thing work.

So, he puts in Resident Evil 2. By the time we get past the first cutscene, I'm already going pale. I had no concept of zombies at that time either, so this was all a great shock to me. Then the game starts going, and Leon Kennedy is desperately pumping round after round into things that die... and then they don't? I never even got to play (the guy was one of those gamers: "Hey, lemme show you something real quick."), but even so, I was terrified. Don't even get me started on how badly those zombies breaking into that gun store scarred me (hint, hint: probably scarred for life). Nowhere was safe!

Then someone suggested Silent Hill and I remember very little after that.

Anyway, my gaming origins, so to speak, are rooted in survival/horror. Since that night, instead of flinching away from any other games of that type from Capcom and others, I ran toward them. I don't know why I did that. Maybe after a scare that bad, it's like a "hair of the dog" kind of thing. As the years went on, I'm not sure if the games stopped being scary, or if nothing had reached that RE2 level of scary since. Resident Evil 4 was the last real freaky-ass game I've played. There's been Bioshock and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but neither of those scared me in the least. I don't even remember jumping.

That's where Dead Space comes in. I had bought it during a Steam sale without really thinking too hard about it. (The game was $5 at the time.) I played the first level, and while it hooked me, I was still getting acquainted with playing games on the PC. This was back when I had just picked up my new comp components, and could suddenly play games of a higher graphical quality than Minesweeper.

The other day, I picked it up again (with the intention of finishing a game so I could clear it off my hard drive), and was suddenly really taken by it. The atmosphere, the story, the gameplay, the macabre and grotesque antagonists: it all sorta clicked. I couldn't put the game down, and ended up finishing it that night. Let me tell you, playing at night was a bad idea.

For the yet-to-be-initiated, Dead Space is a survival/horror game that takes place in spaaaaace. A massive, sub-orbital mining vessel (also known as a "planet cracker") called the U.S.G. Ishimura has recently gone dark, and a distress signal is sent out. The corporation that owns the ship tasks Isaac Clarke, a space-engineer (Space Mario), and his team with figuring out what's gone wrong on the Ishimura, and to fix the problem if possible. After a hard landing, the rescue team finds that the ship appears abandoned. This doesn't last too long, though, as they're soon attacked by the gruesome, mutated creatures informally named "necromorphs."

The whole of Ishimura's crew have been mutated into decidedly inhuman beings, and they don't have a fondness for anything that isn't dead. So, Issac and the rescue team have to figure out a way to get off the planet cracker, stop the necromorphs from infecting other planets (mainly Earth), all the while attempting to look for survivors. Issac's girlfriend, Nicole, was also a member of the crew, so he also has to deal with that along the way - on top of everything else.

All right: the necromorphs. It's clear that this game was primarily inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, and this is a very good thing (hehe). The monsters you fight are not only painfully scary, they're downright disturbing. You might spend moments of your fights with them just reconciling what they were with what they are. Much like Gabriel Iglesias' "Six Levels of Fatness," there are Six Levels of Scary in this game:

1. Creepy

2. Freaky

3. Frightening

4. Disturbing

5. DAMN!

6. F**ked Up

Sometimes I'd die because I was so distracted by the design of these things, looking on in horror as they approached. Dealing with that is just one part of the game, though. Let's not forget that you're in outer space, and the developers have gone all out to ensure that they take advantage of this. You'll be playing engineer a lot (maybe more than some would like), and fighting things like rogue asteroids, orbit decay, and zero gravity in order to get yourself the hell outta Dodge.

And this is what I really liked about Dead Space. All of your missions, for better or worse, are always sci-fi oriented. Go restore gravity to this deck, take a walk outside before a meteor shower tears you to shreds, play some zero-g basketball to retrieve a nav card (yes, this is an option), learn about the future's most prevalent religion: Unitology. All of this makes your stay aboard the Ishimura a very immersive one. You get a really good feel of how the crew operated aboard the vessel, humanity's economy, technology, social structure. It's a nice, clean(ish) cross-section of a very well thought-out science fictional future in store for humankind.

This isn't a straight-up gorefest. Clearly a lot of thought was put into making the ship and the society that clings to the stars around it feel very logical. That's the key to good science fiction and good horror. Things just flat out make sense. You'll spend very little time questioning the science of this or the logic of that.

If there is one thing that this game suffers from, it's the "Oh! Just one more thing!" syndrome that some games suffer from. This can make the game feel very frustrating at times. Yes, you've just spent an hour fixing the shuttle: Oh! Just one more thing! It seems someone removed the navigational system from it, so I guess you'll have to find it. Yes, you've just spent an hour getting the Ishimura's engine's back online: Oh! Just one more thing! It seems we're passing through an asteroid field now, so you'd better get the defensive countermeasures up and running before we do anything else.

It feels very much like Alan Wake or Dragon Age 2 when they're at their worst (which, for DA2, is all the time - hiyooo!). It can never just be over and done with. One more thing has to go wrong so you'll spend more time running around the ship from hell. Dead Space is fantastic, but the Writer of Subtle Plotlines over at Visceral Games seems to take a vacation at random times. Still, even then, some of these little sidequests take you to some amazing places. So while I don't applaud how they get you there, I'm glad that they get you there, if that makes any sense. It's like being driven to an arcade in a Ford Pinto.

And I just have to say that the visuals are dazzling. For a three-year-old game, there were several moments where I just had to stand and stare for a while. Remember that one really great moment in Mass Effect 2, when you step into the exposed CIC of the Normandy as it's getting torn apart by the Collector vessel? There are several just like that.

Sometimes it's a blessing: playing a game so late in its life cycle. Because now I've played a game that I truly love, and I don't have to wait any time at all to play the sequel! Dead Space is just a fantastic game. No, it's not perfect, but it's original where it counts. Much like Mirror's Edge, you just don't expect games like this to come around every dynasty. Dead Space is a violent, shocking, disturbing, thought-provoking game that's damn fun to play. The immersion factor is high, the sci-fi is mostly on par with Mass Effect, and it'll probably scare the hell out of you.

If you haven't played it, give it a try! Again, like Mirror's Edge, you could probably pick it up for $10 easy. You could do worse!