Just finished playing Dead Space for a couple hours…  I’ve apparently logged about 5 hours now, and I’ve just finished chapter 4.  Little bit over an hour per chapter…  Not too bad.  I’ve heard that the game is about 12 hours long, so I guess I’m roughly a third of the way through it.

Chapter 3 – Course Correction.  I find out that the engines are offline and we’re going to crash into the planet soon.  I had to run down to engineering and get the engines back on line.  Honestly, when I heard what the task was, I had to chuckle.  I’m sure actually fixing something sounded awfully easy to Isaac – that’s the only part of this game that’s actually in his job description.

Engineering was full of moving parts and dangerous machinery.  Lots of caution signs that seemed a little understated considering the massive quantities of blood splattered everywhere.  I had to deal with more zero-g stuff, and more vacuum.  I also managed to get myself squished by a giant gyroscope.  Had to play around with the kinesis and stasis modules some more.

I ran into some new monsters…  Some vaguely humanoid ones, like what I usually see, but these are a little tougher.  And some little blobby things that want to jump on your face.  And some kind of manta-looking thing.

I played around with the line cutter a bit more…  Very useful on tougher enemies, especially the humanoid ones.  It’ll slice them in half with a single shot.  And it turns out the assault rifle is pretty handy on swarms of the little blobby things.  I also got grabbed by a giant tentacle that tried to drag me to my death.  It took me several tries to actually survive that encounter.

Once I got the engines and gyros on-line Kendra showed up again.  She’s hiding in the computer core and seems very suspicious of Zach.  She seems to think he’s withholding information.  She informed us that we can’t just correct our course, because that’ll take us right through debris field, which will destroy the ship.

So I had to run off to the bridge area and get the automated defenses working again.

Chapter 4 – Obliteration Imminent.  This chapter seemed a little short to me…  Or maybe it’s just because it was fairly fast-paced.  I had to meet up with Zach on the bridge, and he informed me that I had to re-route power to get the defenses back on-line.  He also assured me that he wasn’t witholding any information…  Somehow his assurances make me even more suspicious.

I ran into my first hulk…  A ginormous necromorph with entirely too much armor.  I guess I’m supposed to get behind them and shoot their back, which is poorly armored.  I tried that, but failed miserably.  I’m just not coordinated to do that.  So I simply wound up hosing them down with the assault rifle.  It works, but it takes a lot of ammo.

I also got my suit upgraded to level 3 – I’m starting to look fairly frightening myself.  Actually the whole ship has an imposing look to it…  It’s got kind of a gothic thing going on.  Columns, and vaults, and glass, and brightly colored holograms…  It reminds me somehow of a big ol’ cathedral.

I got the blueprints for a couple new weapons – the ripper, contact beam, and force gun.  I built a ripper but I haven’t really used it yet, there’s been precious little ammo for it.  I haven’t even built a contact beam or force gun because I haven’t seen any ammo for either of those.  And I’ve stopped carrying around the flamethrower, it just wasn’t useful.  I’ve upgraded my plasma cutter a couple times, and my assault rifle, and those are the two that I generally use – with the line cutter on hand for anything big.

I had to deal with a couple instances of explosive decompression.  Asteroids hit the ship and ripped holes in the hull, and suddenly I’m running off borrowed time.  Actually though, it isn’t really that hard to make it where you need to before your air runs out.

Went through a very cool sequence where I was walking across the outer hull of the ship…  Had to manually target the defense systems while Zach tried to get the computers working again.  I had to walk across the hull of the ship, periodically ducking behind cover while asteroids crashed around me.  The asteroid shoot-em-up sequence was kind of lame though…  Just had to blast asteroids before they hit the ship.  Didn’t really do much for me.

Of course there’s no rest for the weary…  No sooner did we get the defenses back on-line than we find out there’s something nasty growing in hydroponics and poisoning the air.  So I’ve got to run back to medical to brew up some kind of anti-monster poison, whicl Zach goes to hydroponics to slow down whatever is in there.

It doesn’t look like we’re as alone aboard the ship as it originally appeared…  I’ve run into a few survivors now.  None of them live long.  They usually mumble something about making them whole again.  And I’ve gotten a couple messages from Nicole, who also wants to be made whole.  And when I arrived in medical, just before quitting for the night, someone was ranting about god’s plan.

Posted on October 24 at 8:42 PM