satisfaction
Last night, after work, we stopped off at GameStop and picked up Dead Space. I played for a couple hours last night, and then spent the rest of the evening jumping at my own shadow.
To start with, there’s no tutorial or opening credits or much of anything. Right away they drop you into the middle of gameplay. You’re playing the character of Isaac Clark, a repair technician sent out to see why CEC has lost contact with their mining ship – the Ishimura. You get a video message from Nicole, your girlfriend, who’s apparently stationed aboard the Ishimura. There’s some chitchat with the other crew aboard the repair shuttle… A vaguely unpleasant lady named Kendra and your fearless leader Zach. There’s also a couple guys flying the ship who don’t say much of anything.
Your shuttle makes a rough landing on the Ishimura and it is immediately obvious that things are not right. There’s debris strewn around here and there, flickering lights, lots of packed bags around the docking bay. Nobody shows up to greet the repair team.
And this is when you start getting a feel for the mechanics and control of the game. There is no HUD. All the information you need is integrated into the environment around you. Your suit has a glowing health indicator on its spinal column… And your weapons display their own information on a display… Communications and inventory management and everything else is handled through holographic displays that hover in front of your character. And your character is always there – the camera hovers over his right shoulder, just behind him, so you can always see yourself.
The controls are a little sluggish, especially the mouse. There’s a noticeable delay before the mouse responds to anything you do. Move the mouse…pause…cursor moves… Stop the mouse…pause…cursor stops… This isn’t very noticeable in the gameplay itself, it simply adds a vaguely cumbersome feel to aiming and movement. Which maybe makes sense, because the suit you’re wearing doesn’t look all that easy to move in. But it is very difficult to navigate the few mouse-enabled menus. I was constantly overshooting buttons and options as I tried to click on them.
For the most part, though, the sluggish mouse doesn’t matter. Hardly any of the interface actually uses a mouse cursor. Navigating your inventory, for example, is done with the arrow keys.
Things hit the fan pretty quickly. The Necromorphs attack, you get cut off from your team, and the two quiet guys get killed. You pick up your first weapon, and get to kill a few necromorphs. Even though I knew about the whole “strategic dismemberment” thing, it still took some getting used to. My first necromorph took about 9 rounds to the body before it died. By contrast, if you aim for the limbs you can take off a leg in one shot, an arm in another shot, and the creature is dead with only two rounds. Of course, it can be hard to keep your wits about you and aim carefully when things start getting messy.
Dead Space is very, very creepy. The horror comes not so much in the form or sudden surprises, but as a sense of overwhelming dread. The ship is falling apart, the crew is dead or insane, there are monsters roaming the halls, your shuttle is gone, you have no way out… It’s very opressive. There’s a real sense that you’ll be very lucky to make it out alive. There are ominous shadows everywhere, strange noises, screams of terror. I expected something horrific to leap out from behind every door I opened. And the fact that generally speaking nothing jumped out at me just made matters worse.
For the most part you can see the creatures coming long before they get within range to hurt you. And they’re relatively easy to kill if you can aim carefully. And you’ve got a decent amount of armor, health, and ammo. So staying alive really isn’t as hard as it was in Resident Evil.
Combat is gratuitously messy. You don’t just shoot the monsters, you dismember them. And limbs don’t pop off cleanly… They go tumbling down the hallway in a shower of blood, and then remain there to twitch and bleed on the ground. Bodies don’t fade away, they linger, with ragdoll physics intact. You literally have to kick them out of your way as you walk down some hallways. Your character winds up covered with blood and gore after a few battles. There’s a real sense of fighting your way through a slaughterhouse.
And the setting is very, very well accomplished. The visuals are simply stunning. The voice acting is terrific. The level design is great, the environment is very believable. The sounds are truly horrific. The monsters are disgusting. It creates such a believable environment that I can almost smell the stink of death coming from my computer…
Along the way you also pick up a couple nifty gadgets for your suit – a stasis module and a kinesis module. Within the context of the game, these modules are intended to help you execute repairs on heavy machinery. But they’re actually just an excuse to give you a couple nifty new toys.
The stasis module lets you temporarily slow down a target. You’ve got limited power, so you need to make your shots count, but it can be very handy. A common theme is malfunctioning doors that keep slamming open and closed. You need to use your stasis module on them to slow them down enough to make it through without be sliced in half. But you can also use your stasis module on necromorphs to slow them down and carefully dissect them.
The kinesis module allows you to pick up, carry, and throw just about anything that isn’t nailed down – much like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. And, much like the gravity gun, it is a lot of fun. You can toss all sorts of debris at the necromorphs… You can use severed limbs, random bodies, chairs, and just about anything else as a weapon.
The game has all sorts of maps and objective screens and things like that to keep you on course. It’s very handy, and it’s all integrated in a believable manner. One very handy feature is the ability for the game to literally draw a line on the floor that directs you to your next objective. No more wandering halls aimlessly as you try to figure out where you’re supposed to be going.
There’s also plenty of opportunities to save your progress. I remember having to go quite some time between saves in Resident Evil, constantly worried that some random zombie attack would ruin all the work I’d done in the last hour or so. Dead Space doesn’t have that feeling. It’s certainly creepy, and downright frightening at times, but there’s never the sense that a single mishap will ruin hours of work. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
In a lot of ways, Dead Space feels more like a horror/shooter hybrid than a traditional survival horror game. I know there are probably people out there who are absolutely appalled at this. Who can’t stand how easy the game is. Who are horribly disappointed that it isn’t more like Resident Evil. But, personally, I’m thrilled.