I’ve spent something like seven hours playing Dead Space now… I guess I’m about halfway through the game. And so far I’m very impressed with it. Lot of fun stuff, interesting mechanics, great visuals… But that isn’t to say that everything is perfect.
I’m on my way back to the bridge, this will be my second time there. I made two trips to medical as well. And A couple trips to the landing bay. I’ve seen some reviews that complained about the backtracking… Said it felt gratuitous and un-necessary… Like it was just tacked on to make the game longer.
I guess I can understand where they’re coming from. Especially since the whole reason I went to medical the second time around was to brew up a poison that didn’t even work. But I’m really not minding the backtracking. Medical had changed enough on my second trip through that it may as well have been a new section. And I’m honestly kind of wishing I had the ability to backtrack more.
I’m not saying I want to be sent to every area at least twice…but it would be nice if I had more freedom of movement. On my second run through medical I left a bunch of monsters alive and a lot of loot on the ground. After the showdown in cryogenics I was given a different exit that took me right to the tram and shuttled me directly to hydroponics. I was not able to go back for the monsters and loot I left behind.
I guess what I’d like to see is more Metroid-like gameplay. I’d like to be able to go back to the docking bay, for example, and grab some goodies that were unreachable without the kinesis module earlier in the game.
I’m really enjoying the weapons and damage mechanics. They’re very refreshing. Combat in Dead Space is almost a parody of traditional location-based damage.
Back in the day, enemies were just sprites, or maybe a pile of polygons if you were lucky. It didn’t really matter if you shot them in the foot or the head, they took the same kind of damage. The advent of location-based damage was huge. Now you could kill someone wil a single shot to the head, instead of multiple body shots.
It adds a kind of realism to the game… Having enemies that take damage more like they would in the real world… And it quickly became the standard in shooters. You quickly learned to aim for the head, or the body at the very least, and pretty much ignored the appendages. Everyone pretty much ignored the appendages - even developers. Very few games allowed you to intentionally target someone’s legs to slow them down, or someone’s arms to disarm them. And gamers have learned to aim for the head or torso instinctively.
And Dead Space just doesn’t work that way. The monsters can take dozens of hits to their body before they go down, but one or two well-placed shots to the limbs will take them out very quickly. Headshots are almost universally useless in Dead Space. You have to actually aim for the extremities.
And this influences your choice of weapons as well. Something like the pulse rifle would be perfect for a game of Half-Life 2 - it’s fast, accurate, holds a lot of ammo, does decent damage - what’s not to like? The problem is that it does damage in a fairly small area, which means it can be hard to cut off someone’s legs with it.
What becomes a very useful weapon is something like the plasma cutter. It’s got a relatively low rate of fire, and doesn’t hold much ammo, but it creates a plane of damage - which can very easily sever a limb.
The amount of damage that you can do, as a raw number, just isn’t that important in Dead Space. It matters more what shape that damage takes.
Dead Space also does a terrific job of balancing suspense, horror, and combat. There’s a constant sense of dread. You’re aboard a ship that is doomed. Its crew is dead, its systems are failing, and it’s over-run with monsters. You will genuinely be lucky to get out alive.
But you get to ease some of that tension by blasting the enemy. And unlike a traditional survival horror game, you actually have a pretty good chance of surviving a random monster attack. You don’t have to spend the entire time running for your life. You don’t have to avoid all confrontation.
Unfortunately, the controls are a bit clumsy and limited on the PC. I know this game was developed with consoles in mind… I suppose I should be happy that it’s available on the PC at all… But I really expect developers to do a better job with their ports than this.
There’s no excuse for a sloppy mouse-driven interface. Too many games have come before that managed to get it right. There’s no reason why I should have to use my arrow keys to navigate my inventory instead of my mouse. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to bind my additional mouse buttons to actions as well… I should be able to put kinesis on mouse4, and stasis on mouse5. I should be able to use my scroll-wheel to switch between weapons, instead of forcing me to use the number keys.
monday
