A simple yet great story, Brilliant Execution.
Of course this review as every other one is subjective to the point where my experiences with games differ from yours, but hear me for a bit. Dead Space is a survival horror game that actually progresses the story in every chapter, has very small sections of the game that would be considered to be meaningless, and weapons are inventive. The enemies of the game are fun to fight and are presented well as monsters we should fear. But people give it a bad rap for making the game sound like a complete repeat of every other survival horror game that has come before it.
The whole story of the game revolves around your character, Isaac Clarke, who wants to save his girlfriend Nicole whilst working with his technician group to fix the Ishimura, a planet-cracker ship with the purpose of opening up the deepest layers of the world in order to acquire various resources that are otherwise impossible to reach with conventional equipment. Something wrong happens to this ship before they even arrive, and the team expects that something's up as soon as they notice the ship is experiencing a complete blackout of communications.
After a nasty crash landing, you begin, go through, and end the game trying to fix the ship and find your girl, with no prerendered cutscenes whatsoever, a defenite positive for any game that is confident with their graphics engine, and it is quite an engine. The graphics are rendered very well and at high resolutions it sparkles with detail in scenes of a lot of light, or brings the feeling of a dark and seemingly lifeless ship in any low-light scenes. Thankfully there are very few scenes that exercise very low light conditions, something that Doom 3 and similar games used in excess to the point where it became considered as another means to artificially increase difficulty by making you almost blind. Most of the time you move around and fight monsters, but they paid a lot of detail and played up a lot of moments when you are not fighting anything at all. Their methods of setting up scenes are so inconsistent, you can almost not expect what will happen next your first time through. Some times you feel as if you are going to be attacked, because you can hear something moving, and things falling to the ground, but then you realise that it's actually safe. You walk away and it's still safe. Go up an elevator. Oh my god that's where he is!
That is a feeling I usually get from this game through my playthrough of it, and i finished the game at the hardest difficulty too. It isn't the hardest game in the world, but it has it's fair share of difficult moments. Luckily the weapons in the game are very effective and were made specifically to remind you about it's key design feature. Headshots are useless in this game, as the creatures are not based on traditional zombie-based creatures requiring a mind, but live without needing one if you shoot it off. To effectively disable the creature (hehe), you must literally shoot off its limbs to slow them to a crawl and kill them for sure. They range from typical humanoid creatures with added scythe claws to the mix, to babies turned into these zombie-like creatures with tentacles that shoot out large needles, and there is an ok variety of creatures in the game. There is more variety in this game than let's say FEAR 1 and 2, but probably not as many as Resident Evil 4 or 5. But it's enough that you can still enjoy the game, though for their next one I think they should increase variety.
The entire interface is built into the world, with player life and energy displayed on his back which is called a RIG, and doors, items, shops, and even various menus are built into the world. This is for one main purpose - to make the place more dangerous than your average SHG. When you look in your inventory or map, you aren't invulnerable to creatures nearby. You cannot look in your inventory whilst fighting creatures, and they will still attack you which In my opinion is a very inventive method of immersing a player into the world, and making the person fear these situations.
As you progress you can upgrade your life, energy, air duration and weapon stats using a bench and some nodes, basically making them an upgrade station and upgrade points in many other games respectively. Since there is a limit of nodes that appear in the game, you cannot upgrade everything to full, and not even close for the most part. This makes the player have to problem solve a bit as to what he/she feels is a more important thing to upgrade. Should the player make their weapons hurt more and conserve ammo, or more health to last longer in a fight should anything unexpected happen.
The narrative isn't the most creative of narratives, as most horror games rely on an idea that has already been made. Even still, it is enjoyable to play through, and the voice acting is quite fine. No one really sounds like they are just saying it, and are all very convincing. This is all positive when trying to immerse a player into the world, with voice actors playing their roles to the letter that it can make such games even a memorable experience.
Now that the basics are out of the way, let's quickly cover the PC aspects of Dead Space. Overall it is a pretty good port with issues that are debatably very little of concern. One problem with the PC version is that with vsync on (it is the default setting), the mouse feels more floaty and oddly slow to respond. Turn that off and it is no longer an issue, with no quality loss and even a performance boost as the point of vsync is to drop framerates to a rate that is smooth and avoids tearing. Graphics are fine and only eagle-eyed players will notice some low-res textures when going into the high spectrum of resolutions. But they are of little concern as the game's graphics is still overall very beautiful. The game is surprisingly quick, taking less than a second to transition between a lot of the chapters and sequences, and initial loading time of a save after running the game is only a couple to a few short seconds on a good computer. A good computer isn't really expensive, as it's just a normal computer anyone would get, plus the additional cost of a mid-range graphics card. Its around the price of a 360 or less, and for PC enthusiasts, is a great message to hear when games everywhere have a range of performance ups and downs. However note that depending on how forgiving you are, most (if not all) of the menus whilst in-game can only be manipulated via keyboard, as it was originally made for consoles in mind.
Overall Dead Space PC is compelling in it's story, a great horror experience for those new in the genre and at least entertaining for everyone else who's already seen this before, and being also a smooth port, I definitely recommend to pick this up.
One note though. Whilst writing this review I was aware of the 5 limit DRM issue that has plagued a growing number of games, and I have to say this - install on a different hard drive and do not delete it. Or even backup the game files elsewhere and put it back if you lose them. As long as you own it legitimately, it should not be a problem. Please inform me if I am wrong and if this method does not work.
