A terrifying start of a franchise
Dead Space is a survival horror shooter from a developer not known for AAA games, EA Redwood. However in these days, EA is different company as a whole and are willing to put their poor annual game business practices aside to try new thing such as Mirror’s Edge and the hit survival horror shooter, Dead Space.
The game takes place in a distant future, where mining is a big industry, so big in fact that there are ships build big and powerful enough to crush and harvest all the valuable minerals of a planet. You play as Engineer Isaac, and you along with a support team are asked to investigate the crown-jewel of a vessel, called Ishimura ‘ The largest vessel in her class’ as said by one of your commanding officer. What appears to be a regular recon mission turns into something straight of the nightmare once inside the ship. You immediately realize that the inhabitants of the ship turned into walking and limping creatures from hell, as you and the support team (or what’s left of it), find out what’s going on, what happened to Isaac’s gf and more importantly, how to get the hell out of here. The game tells the story by cutscenes and audio and text logs which are scattered throughout the ship to find out what happened before everything fell apart.
The gameplay borrows a lot from the Resident Evil and Gears of War franchises with over the shoulder view and slow movements to keep you on your toes. There is good variety of nontraditional weapons in the game, as with this comes a twist to the gameplay. Normally shooters require you to aim for the head, but not this one if you want to save ammunition. The Necromorphs (the hideous baddies in the game) should be taken out by cutting off their limbs as much as you can, so the weapons are focused on cutting rather than firepower, as rational weapons in the game like the pulse rifle doesn’t do well against them.
The game basically has no HUD, all that information instead is displayed in a holographic screen emitting from your helmet. From here you can manage inventory, weapons, listen to audio dairies and view the map. This helps the experience to stay intact and leave you vulnerable whenever you want change something.
The game allows you to upgrade your weapons and armored suit with ‘nodes’ which you can acquire throughout the ship, or buy from one of the machines. The ‘upgrade path’ insures that you cannot jump from one desired upgrade to another and keeps it balanced.
Some cool sections in the game involve Zero-G. With you magnetic boats, you can make the roof your floor and vice versa, it changes dramatically and you can use it to reach places you wouldn’t normally able to reach. Nice touch is how the sound of the ambiance decreases compared to your breathing.
The graphics are good with terrific lighting and shadowing which elevates the atmosphere of the game. The character models are good and the necromorphs are hideously designed, perfect.
The sound is the best technical aspect of the game, there isn’t much of a soundtrack as it is a survival horror game, but the environmental sounds does all the work to scare you s***less. Amazing sound system, it gives you shivers when a person or something screams and you can hear it crawling in the vents. Dead Space has the best atmospheric sound of all games in 2007.
The only thing I didn’t like about the game is I guess the story isn’t all that great, in fact I bet many of you will completely ignore it. Also it could have used some sort of a multiplayer last standing mode where you and a friend could fend off a never ending group of necromorphs.
Solid game, if you are into third person shooter or horror. You definitely shouldn’t miss out on one of the sleeper hits of 2007.
