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