Dead Space

 The horror genre has always been overlooked, sure some games happen to emerge every now and then, but I find that the theme could be a lot more well explored. With the advancement of graphical capabilities, lightning and sound effects the tools for creating creepy atmospheres and gruesome stories also advanced. Dead Space is not exactly your average horror game, but does the job nicely in constructing and maintaining a continuous atmosphere of solitude and suspense.

Here you play as a guy named Isaac Clarke, who's an engineer, in a mission to investigate a ship named USG Ishimura after receiving a distress signal coming from it. When he and his crew get to the ship a problem happens and their ship gets badly damaged, they find themselves trapped in the Ishimura, but none of them are yet sure of what happened with the crew previously on board and the reason for them to send the distress signal, so they start to investigate the ship, only to find that the ship is infested with monsters and various strange fearsome creatures. Isaac is separated from the group at the very beginning and so the adventure begins.

A must have for this kind of game is a chaotic location constantly giving a feeling of loneliness and unprotection. You can find lots of it in this game, the locations aren't exactly a lesson in chaos and destruction, but that doesn't stop the rooms from being extremely well-designed forming a futuristic mess. After all, I believe that wasn't even the focus of the producers and designers, and perhaps if the locations were to be more chaotic the game wouldn't be so good. Let's just say it has its own personality and it fits well on it. Being trapped in a ship with no place else to run also spices up the experience immensely. Kinda makes you remember the tagline for the first Alien movie -- In space no one can hear you scream. Well, it's something like that.

You control your character from a third-person perspective and the aim is similar to what you can find in Resident Evil 4, a laser aim. The guns aren't your average guns either, the main focus are the common ones, like a pistol, a machine gun and all that. But you also find some different kinds of weapons along the way. But even the average weapons functions somewhat in a singular way, like the pistol having a three location shot and being able to choose how the aim will work, horizontally or vertically.

The menace to your survival are monsters of all kinds, it is said in the beginning of the game that you should use a especial method for killing them, instead of the usual "aim for the head" kind of monster, you should now focus on the limbs, so first dismember them and receive the bonus of damage, it's the best way because with no legs to move they will have to crawl to get you, slowing them down, and your job in exterminating them will be much easier.

Another nice little touch is the interface in which you control your health and items, they are all in-game and tridimensional -- the actual screen is clear, no numbers or health bars of any kind, very cool -- you press the menu and a display will appear in front of your character, the menu won't stop the action and if an enemy is around he will surely attack you, also the health is measured in a tube on the back of your character, as well as other techniques demanding some kind of measure upon usage, all located in displays at the back of the character. So it's just the cam behind the character and no outside display. That's an interesting improvement and especially for a horror game, you get to think you're really into the Ishimura with no much help and not playing a game, pretty immersive.

The game could be almost perfect if wasn't for little details, like in the middle of the adventure when you're asked to defend the ship from asteroids, and you should control a cannon to do that, and I must say that this little moment jeopardized a hell of an experience, the controls for the cannon are loose and imprecise, and certainly doesn't fit the game. The game is broken into chapters and each one of them you need to fix or do something to fix the spacecraft and, ultimately, return home safely. The job won't be easy with enemies scattered all around the spaceship demanding different ways to exterminate, and also colossal bosses that will make you shiver.

Another cool gameplay mechanism is the zero-gravity rooms, places with no gravity where you can hover in the air and reach the opposite extremity of a room by simply aiming and jumping. You also have a limited time to stay in these areas, which can be increase by upgrading your equipment.

The sound effects play a major role in this game, if you have a respectable audio system you'll feel in heaven as the sound effects feel real and amazingly well-constructed. The music itself is non-existent since would be a shame to have music, even creepy compositions, in a game made to make you feel lonely and unprotected. The eminent silence will keep you wishing there was music to crush the long moments of sinister atmosphere, never letting you presage a future jump off from the chair.

If you're a fan of horror-themed  games this is a must play, especially knowing that the genre doesn't receive the attention it deserves and that it's hard to find an actual great game. Dead Space is a great game, and it also actually manages to reinvent the genre in a meaningful way, while still bring the must-haves that we all love for this kind of game -- like an outstanding creepy atmosphere --, resulting in a game that exceeds any expectations one may have.