Last night’s session of Dead Space took me to medical to get some codes off the dead captain.

For the most part medical was cleaner and better lit than what I’d seen previously.  Sure, there were dead bodies…  And blood smeared around…  But there were many places where that horrific mess was more-or-less contained.  A few areas looked downright pleasant by comparison to the rest of the ship.

Shortly after my arrival in medical I was given my first chance to play around with the kinesis module.  There were some giant cabinets blocking a hallway, and I had to throw them out of the way.  I also tried to use some random objects as weapons…  Throwing them at the enemy…  But I’m just not coordinated enough to do that while the monsters charge at me.

I also discovered that the green boxes that I’ve been trying to open need to be smashed.  I didn’t realize they could be smashed.  I kept trying to just open them, and eventually gave up.  Now I’m wondering what all I’ve missed along the way…

Once again, my main objective broke down into two secondary objectives.  Someone had barricaded off a section of medical, and I had to get through the barricade.  In order to do that I had to gather the components of a small explosive.

I met a new type of necromorph…  Some kind of evil baby with tentacles.  They’re smaller, harder to hit, but don’t seem to move as fast as the others.  And they look damn freaky.

I experienced my first airless section of the ship…  There was a giant hole in the hull of the ship, no oxygen, so I was running on borrowed time.  In a vacuum, sound doesn’t travel very well at all.  And Dead Space does a great job of portraying this.  Your own breathing becomes louder, as do your footfalls, but everything else is very muted.  I couldn’t even hear my own gunshots.  Very dramatic.

I also experienced my first zero-g section of the ship…  A large chamber where I had to leap onto the cieling to make my way across the room.  And later, when I came back through, I got to fight some necromorphs in zero-g.  Very odd.  Very cool to leap onto the cieling to avoid an attack…  At least it is when you know the attack is coming.  Not so cool when they leap onto you from the cieling…

The morgue really wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.  I figured that in a ship over-run with creatures made from dead bodies, the last place I’d want to be is the morgue.  And it certainly wasn’t a good place to be.  But I really expected worse.  Especially with all the horrible noises I heard on my approach.  There’s something big in this ship, something big and unhappy.  And I’m certain I’ll have to deal with it eventually.

So, I made it to the captain.  He was a little worse for wear.  Had to fight my first “boss”…  I put it in quotes, because it wasn’t much of a boss fight.  Hit him with stasis and then just chopped off his limbs.  Easy enough.  I suspect they’ll get harder – the first boss is typically pretty easy.

I picked up a few different weapons along the way…  A flamethrower, some kind of assault rifle, and a line cutter.  The flamethrower seems fairly useless to me.  It eats fuel very fast, doesn’t seem to do all that much damage, and you have to be relatively close to your target.  Might be handy for a swarm of little guys, but I haven’t found a good use for it yet.

The assault rifle shoots lots of bullets fairly quickly, puts lots of holes in things.  The problem is that necromorphs don’t seem to care too much about holes.  You need to lop off limbs, not just puncture them.  Again, it might be handy when faced with a swarm/crowd, but I haven’t found it all that useful.

The line cutter is a bigger version of the plasma cutter I’ve been using.  Does more damage, projects a wider cutting path.  I like it quite a bit, but ammo is very limited at this stage and it really is overkill for the things I’m fighting.

So, I’ve been sticking with the plasma cutter as my weapon of choice.  By hitting the secondary fire button you can rotate the cutting beam so it is horizontal instead of vertical – fantastic for cutting off limbs.  I’ve gotten very proficient at chopping up necromorphs with it.  The drawbacks are that it doesn’t fire all that quickly, and it holds a fairly limited number of rounds.  Both of which can probably be fixed one I find some more power cells.

So, the good news is that Zach has access to all the ship’s computers and controls and stuff.  The bad news is that Kendra’s gone missing, the engines are offline, and we’re slowly drifting towards the planet’s surface.  So, now I’m off to engineering to see what I can do to improve the situation…

Posted on October 24 at 9:53 AM