Hamst3r's Quick Review
Dead Space
While many new games try and rip off the highly-acclaimed games of the past in an attempt to be as popular as them, the knockoffs typically end up failing regardless of how similar they are to the source material. There are also certain concepts that have been done to death now; such as time manipulation. Yet there are games which have shown us that even overused game mechanics such as time manipulation can still be used in a fresh and innovative fashion, e.g., Braid.
Dead Space has a lot of this derivation going on…from the game design to the story, it’s all very familiar. That said though, as absurd as it may be, Dead Space still feels fresh and interesting. Not only does it capture the essence of all it’s borrowed elements, Dead Space manages to bring a lot of fresh ideas to the table, combining them together with expert care.
Some of the new hotness that Dead Space brings is in the way you must kill your enemies and how your weapons function to coincide with that. The only way to kill the enemies in Dead Space is to slice off several of their appendages. Thus, most of your weapons fire out a wide beam of death, perfect for doing such things. You can even use the alternate fire to switch between horizontal beams of death and vertical beams of death, for more precise slicing and dicing. You’ll definitely want to make use of this functionality too, as shooting enemies in the face or body is mostly useless and can even make things worse. For me, the best strategy was to shoot off one leg to drop the enemy to the ground and then work on shooting off the arms.
Throughout Dead Space are store terminals which you can use to buy things and sell excess items. You can also store things in a safe, which I ended up using way more often then I thought I would. In addition to this, you can upgrade your suit, weapons and various powers by collecting power nodes and using them at upgrade benches. Power nodes can also be used to unlock certain locations, so you’ll have to decide between making your gun shoot faster or finding out what’s behind the mysterious door. I found unlocking these doors to be well worth the while as the rooms often contained valuable items and interesting audio logs.
Ultimately, Dead Space looks fantastic and kept me interested the whole way through with the diversity of the areas and the frantic nature of the gameplay. While the story is nothing groundbreaking and a lot of what’s happening has been done before, I still found Dead Space to be interesting and fun to play. The enemies are fast and menacing, the sound design is top notch and the “strategic dismemberment” of enemies is very satisfying. I highly suggest picking up Dead Space – it’s definitely one of my favorite games released this year.
