It takes lots of risks without actually being risky and further blurs the line between character action games and survival horror. Much of what you see in Dead Space is ripped directly out of other titles.
Third person over the shoulder perspective, check, Sci-fi story with way more going on than the game let’s on, check, suspense filled gameplay built around a lack of ammo and undead-like enemies, check, in game audio logs that give you bits and pieces of the story as you go, check. So, there isn’t too much here that you haven’t seen before.
What makes Dead Space different and noteworthy is its ability to take what it has learned from other games and built upon that. Think of it as a “student has becomes the master” scenario.
Probably the biggest risk that Dead Space takes is its dismemberment system. Anyone that has played a shooter knows that to kill your enemies you must shoot them in the face or the chest and they will go down pretty quickly. The opposite is the case in Dead Space. The enemies can take up to a dozen shots to the chest, but if you can strategically chop off 2 or 3 limbs they will crumple like a rag doll. Getting out of the headshot mentality can be tricky at first, and really tests your aiming skills.
Also, with on-screen HUDs pretty much being a thing of the past, developers have to find ways to streamline the way they communicate status information such as health and energy to the player. Dead Space puts your health bar and stasis pack energy on your back as part of your suit/rig. This ends up being a genius way to get the point across and adds a layer of realism to the overall setting of the game.
Here’s a bit of the story, on which you can munch. You are sent with a small group of companions to investigate the communication failure of the space ship Ishimura. It was extracting a religious artifact from the core of a planet and went completely offline. When you board the ship, you find that the majority of the crew is dead and most of your buddies end up that way as well. A strange mutant looking species has all but taken over the ship and when the ship you arrived in is incapacitated “while docking” you are pretty much screwed and stuck with these monsters on the Ishimura.
From there, the story gets unnecessarily deep. Where other games would stop and dwell on how boned you are being stuck on the ship and really not delve too deep into the lore and origins of the monsters, Dead Space fleshes out an elaborate back story that includes a crazy scientology-esq religion and addresses the significance of the actions of the dead Ishimura crew members.
Dead Space, in place of these, has a series of save locations, throughout the game, that not only have to be activated manually, but also cause you to jump all the way out of the game to the generic PS3 save screen. This, at times, killed the action and became tedious about half way through the game. Not to mention that these save stations are everywhere. Almost every major room has one. If, as a developer, you decide to offer to save your players games around every corner in the game, please just implement an auto save or even a save state emulator style. Manual saving is very fifth generation and is not acceptable by modern standards.
Another thing that Dead Space has a huge problem with is keeping the difficulty curve steady. Having ungodly hard parts in a game 25-50% of the way through is terribly disheartening and can cause a player quit playing it entirely (which I almost did twice.) There is one part in particular, that is not only nearly impossible, but also built upon a completely different game mechanic. During a chapter you are tasked with protecting the integrity of the outer hull of the Ishimura. You do this by using a gun turret Luke Skywalker style. This is all well and good but for some one that is pretty good at 1st/3rd person shooters, a stationary turret game mechanic can rip you a new one (obviously I’m talking about me).
It’s the equivalent of playing through half of Tetris and suddenly having to win a cart racing game. The gameplay difference will throw you off and if you are not well practiced at cart racers, you may or may not ever succeed. I call this common problem with games “Devil May Cry Syndrome.” Most of DMC was a hack and slash shoot-em-up character action game, but the final boss played like a Star Fox game. I was both surprised and frustrated by this turn of events in both games and ended up slightly damaging my PS3 controller in frustration.
Visually, at least on the PS3, Dead Space is stunning and startlingly disgusting. Outside of having to use the god awful PS3 controller, the game controls just fine with 3rd person control staples being present in all mechanics. The sound design is perfect (literally perfect) and the story progression is solid. By the end of the game you really fell like you are screwed and will be left to die on the ship. It sets itself up for limitless sequels and as stated before it helps welcome EA back into the world of serious console gaming.
