Dead Space 2

The first game of 2011 which I have played, I was hoping for a good start to the gaming year, and I was not disappointed.  I was worried when EA were talking up the introduction of multiplayer and of making the game action orientated. Having been a huge fan of the isolation and dread  filled atmosphere of the first game, I feared that it would become an action game without atmosphere. While Dead Space 2 is much more action orientated than Dead Space, and it has lost that sense of dread, it has also gained hugely in production values, scale, and has a more tense and personal story.  The first 5 minutes of this game really set the tone: frantic, heart pounding and gore filled. The scare moments are still there, and the action sequences have been seriously ramped up from Dead Space 1. 
 
Set 2 years after the events of Dead Space 1, Isaac is now in a mental ward onboard a vast space installation called the Sprawl. Its a mining city with a large number of inhabitants. Things quickly go wrong on the Sprawl, and the dreaded necromorphs make a return. Isaac needs to escape the Sprawl, but mysteries involving the government and the unitologists quickly arise. A lot of the story is told through voice logs, but there are a lot more cinematic moments in this game and the cast of characters has been expanded. Isaac is now fully voiced and voiced well at that. Overall the story is superior to Dead Space 1, and the game leaves plenty of questions about the lore and about what murky forces are at work in the Dead Space universe in the background while also providing a satisfying ending to this game. You get a sense of Isaac's mental state, and the characterisation is done very well. The interactions with other characters and survivors really flesh out the story and make for an interesting narrative. The dread atmosphere and isolation of Dead Space 1 has been replaced with a more action based game here, but the Sprawl is a much more varied and colourful environment than the Ishimura was.  You will play in residential areas, schools, and a church. The game also has some brilliant scripted situations and a great pacing to its progression.   
              

 
The graphics are fantastic, with haunting visuals and an incredible level of art and architecture detail in the environments, the church of unitology being the high point for design in my opinion. The game also takes a fantastic location twist which greatly adds to the atmosphere and increases the environmental variety. Its really surprising to see how many different areas Visceral managed to put into a game set on a space station. Fires, debris and particles all look great in the fabulous lighting of the game. As the Sprawl has a civilian population, you will occasionally see people fleeing from awful situations and dark twists on every day locations as the necromorphs spread. Speaking of the necromorphs, the visual design of the enemies in Dead Space 2 is excellent. The enemies are truly disgusting and terrible to face to the point where you do not want to get too close to them. They really do look like twisted reanimated corpses, and there claws, tendrils and other physical attributes all look fantastic.
 
  
 
  The sound is, like the first game, incredible. The music is perfect at creating tension and dread at the right points, the sounds of the necromorphs are suitably horrible and the atmospheric and environmental sounds really make you feel like titan station is an in use entity. The voice acting is also done really well, with Isaac being done especially suitably. The weapons all sound good, especially the ones that involve interaction with the environment. The grinding of metal and  sounds of escaping gases in certain rooms all add to the ambiance of the game, and the quality of the sound design is astounding. Everything is done so carefully that the game feels like a small group of individuals really took care of this aspect of it and made a genuine effort to make it the best they could, and to have this quality of sound is a special thing.     

 
 
 The combat still revolves around dismembering enemies limbs, but the variety of weapons and new enemies, as well as the ability to move while reloading [take note resident evil] makes it brilliant and tense. Even the zero gravity bits have been improved, with the ability to play around via thruster boots being a fantastic addition. The core game is still the same third person action that the first Dead Space was, but the minor enhancements to the controls really help to smooth out the experience and endear themselves to the new focus on action that the game has taken. Rarely will you be able to flee from enemies, so some survival horror conventions have been lost here, but as an action experience Dead Space 2 controls a hell of a lot better than its counterparts such as Resident Evil 5 and Alan Wake.
 
 There is multiplayer in the game aswell, its not very good and I didnt play it for long as it adds nothing to the game and the single player is where its at in this game in my opinion. The game has a proper new game plus mode this time, making multiple playthroughs an easy and enticing option, and with a game this good I would imagine a necessity. The multiplayer is a shallow and quite boring experience which feels like a poor copy of Left 4 Dead, but thankfully the core game is good enough to ignore that the multiplayer is even there.     
 

 
 
 The game has 15 chapters, and is a lengthy playthrough on the first occasion, although it took less time on my second playthrough. In the end, Dead Space 2 is not as scary and atmospheric as Dead Space, but it is longer, has more enemies and weapons, better environments and better production values. Gameplay is faster and more satisfying in small ways but these changes make the game feel like a more effective beast.  It's a game that looks and sounds incredible, with a good story, frightening moments and great replay value. EA and Visceral have produced a fantastic game and franchise with this and I hope it continues into the future. The story leaves interesting events and possible new villains unexplored, giving the series plenty of options for the future.      
 

 

Pros:    

• Great graphics and attention to visual design
• Long campaign with plenty of impressive moments
• Immersive sound design 
• Dismemberment is great and gory
• The action is better and controls are slightly improved

 

Cons:  

• No real boss fights until the end
• Multiplayer is throw away
• Disc swapping is annoying
• The isolation element from the first game is gone
• Just not all that scary

 

wtf:  

• Why put a needle there, why???

• 8/10