Story

The story follows our protagonist from the previous two Dead Space games, Isaac Clark. Two years after Dead Space 2, Isaac is estranged from his main squeeze Ellie, and lives a sad and boring life on the moon. He is promptly.. thrusted back into battle, as you can see in the screenshot up top, by two dudes of the last battalion of EarthGov. He needs to go save Ellie and her team, who’ve gone missing on Hoth. Unitologists get all uppity and try to kill them for some reason, and accidentally call back the Necromorphs, and it’s up to Isaac to finish off the scourge once and for all, or something.

Obviously, this being my first Dead Space, the story is going to be a point of the game I don’t get and I dislike. So I pretty much don’t get and dislike this story. I did a playthrough of this game with Casey for the youtube channel, and maybe it was because we were talking over the cutscenes, but I have no clue what happened in this game. I have no idea who Unitologists are, where Necromorphs come from or who they are, or why that weird Lost Planet intro happened. I should’ve paid better attention, so this one is probably my fault. If I had played the previous ones, it would most definitely make more sense. However, skimming through the story on Wikipedia, I was able to throw together that synopsis up there, and reading through the article, I probably haven’t missed out on our generation’s Citizen Kane.

Gameplay

I played Co-op through the entire story as John Carver, the backup to Isaac Clarke. He is a man who has quite a past, which isn’t all that well explained. From what I understand, he beat up his wife and kid, possibly to death, and kinda got sad about it afterwards. He gets flashbacks and hallucinations when coming into contact with red ‘markers’ (thanks Wikipedia!), and has to fight his way out of them. During the hallucinations, the person who you’re playing co-op with has to protect your catatonic body. You also see different things than him during special co-op missions. Mostly streamers and banners saying “Daddy hates me.” That’s all well and good, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but for Isaac the game must’ve been kinda boring. You’d probably feel kind of jealous that I’m seeing all this interesting stuff while you’re just going through the same dull corridors over and over. A common theme seems to be that there just isn’t much variety in this game. The objectives you have to do are either “Go here and press this button- but oh wait! You have to press this button first!” or fetch quests.

The combat in this game is decent. Killing enemies seems to take forever sometimes, and other enemies seem like they’re made of paper. Charge weapons become completely useless about 1/3 of the way through the game, when all the enemies decide to start sprinting and running around, and most of the time you’ll have your head ripped off before you can see what’s attacking you. There also seems to be a disturbing amount of instakill monsters in horror games lately. The ones in this game probably aren’t technically, but they hurt you so much on normal that they might as well be. But, once you get used to using your stasis, it gets easier. You have to really remember to use it or you’ll be throttled at every turn. It’s kind of a cop-out to use instant kill attacks and invulnerable enemies to instill fear in the player in my opinion.

A feature of this game is building and upgrading your weapons using construction benches strewn around. You can gather supplies and make a new gun or upgrade them with circuit chip things. I got a preorder exclusive gun, so I didn’t have to use it too much, but I can tell you, if you find a military engine, use it and never look back. Shotguns are your biggest and best friend in this game, and you won’t go far without one. Beyond that, make sure you have all damage enhancers and magazine extenders for circuits.

I’m not sure if we ever determined it conclusively, but from what I can tell, co-op doubles the enemies spawned during the game. A problem arises when the size of the room isn’t changed, so smallish rooms become abattoirs with barely any room between each enemy. The train station was complete shithouse for this very reason. Trying to kill the enemies in front of you, BUT OH WAIT, one spawned behind you! Then there are 3 literally invincible guys milling about. At every moment there’s an enemy a few inches away from you, and it sucked.

Of course, there are some positives still laying around, like the movement in anti-gravity. Space is really awesome, too.

Graphics and Design

The graphics of this game vary wildly. Whenever you’re inside, it always seems like the game is way too dark, but whenever your outside, it looks great. Space is honestly done really well, and sunsets look good too. Maybe the bloom just hides everything, but it doesn’t look that bad. Not one of the best looking games around, but it’s notable. The level design could use some work though. Everywhere you go feels exactly the same. You have to keep going down into the dark and bleak corridors throughout the game, and it all feels really boring after a while. It could use a change of pace, and variety. However, as I said earlier, I played Carver, so a couple of the corridors were all filled with nutcracker dudes and streamers, and was a nice breath of fresh air. Not much else to note. Nothing here is really too bad or too good. It’s very okay.

Conclusion

As I said earlier, I am coming in with no understanding of Dead Space or its story. From what I can tell though, this game is boring. It’s billed as a horror game, which I can’t agree with. It’s incredibly dark at times, and nothing ever scared me. I never jumped once. I didn’t feel terror, or anything. The combat is annoying with enemies that can strip away most of your health in an instant.. I don’t know. Me and Casey had a huge debate about giving this a 2/5 or 3/5. Supposedly, 3/5 is ‘average’ territory, and I previously thought that this game was average. Therefore it should = 3/5. Upon writing this review however, my views changed. I can’t think of too much fun I had with this game beyond making fun of the game itself, and chatting with Casey. For the record, I agree 3/5 is average territory, and you can love an average game, like I love CS:GO. CS:GO however didn’t offer much, and there was a part of me that said CS:GO didn’t deserve a 4/5 even though I love it. I don’t love Dead Space 3. If I had entered into this series earlier, I might’ve, and would’ve most likely, enjoyed it more. For right now, I can’t say that I do.