Game Review: Dead Space

Dead Space is a game with a lot of promise and occasional flashes of brilliance held back by the cliches of the survival horror genre and some very frustrating gameplay decisions.

The formula is tried and true: contact has been lost with the USG Ishimura, a huge, Red Dwarf-style mining ship which is currently engaged in a planet-cracking mission wherein it blasts a huge chunk of a mineral-rich planet's crust into orbit and then feasts on the tasty, tasty ore inside.  Apparently having never seen any sci-fi or horror movies before, the mining company sends a tiny repair ship with a crew of five to assist the Ishimura with its "communications malfunction" (yeah, right).  One wonders why a ship with a crew of thousands, a ship so large it requires its own internal tram system to get around, needs help from a scow the size of a large Winnebago that can cruise into one of its docking bays without even tickling.  Seriously, if the Ishimura were a woman, she would totally be saying "Are you in yet?"  If I were designing a miles-long city in space, the first thing I would do is make sure it had several Winnebagos' worth of spare parts, and a repair crew of at least five people.

But I digress.  That's the formula, and hey, it's there because it works.  Needless to say, shortly after docking, the repair crew discovers that tasty, tasty ore is not the only thing the ship has been feeding on: they are attacked by a horde of zombieesque monsters, two nameless crew members are killed, and the rest are separated by an automated quarantine procedure and must work separately to keep the mining ship functional while they figure out what's going on and try to get the hell away from it.

I won't spoil the rest of the story, but you can probably guess a lot of it yourself.  Mutated crew members?  Check.  Ancient alien artifact?  Check.  Secret government agenda?  Check.  And that's fine, you know?  The merit of a game like this isn't in the plotline.

The merit is in the execution, and unfortunately Dead Space achieves only mixed results.  There's certainly a lot to like: the graphics and sound are fine, the atmosphere is appropriately spooky, and there are some good memorable sequences.

But gameplay is an issue.  The engine offers a third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective (like Gears of War), and frankly I've never understood what that kind of setup has to offer over a traditional first-person camera.  I mean, yes, it's interesting to see your character running around for the first few minutes, but in the end it serves only to break immersion.  I want to be the character, not watch him — especially in a game like this, where becoming invested in the setting is crucial.  Also, it's very frustrating to have a large portion of the screen blocked by the back of your character's head.  Why can't I see everything he sees?

On top of that, there are some other problems.  For starters, save checkpoints.  Why?  Why, in this day and age, when even consoles have plenty of storage, should I not be able to save my game any damn time I want?  Why should I have to do the same damn action sequence over and over from the beginning just because I had difficulty getting out of the way of a huge moving crane arm ten minutes in?  There were several times I had to stop playing in disgust because of the lack of a normal save feature, and developers need to ask themselves if that's really the way they want their audience to feel about their game.  This is the 21st century, there's no excuse for this kind of thing anymore.

Also annoying is the fact that you have to switch between several modes during play: one mode to move around and interact with consoles and equipment, another mode to raise your gun and actually shoot stuff, a third mode to view your inventory, etc.  When a zombie jumps around a corner at you, it's frustrating to have to press a key to go into "shoot mode" before I can do anything about it.  I want to be able to just hit the fire button and have it work.

The game also suffers from its straight-ahead, shoot-em-up style.  There's no stealth mode, no traps you can set.  You can't even jump except in some of the zero-g sequences.  Running away is sometimes an option, but I don't think that's anyone's preferred style of play.  Some tactical flexibility would've gone a long way toward making this game more enjoyable.

And finally, a minor quibble: keep the character under the player's control when at all possible.  There are many sequences in Dead Space where you have to activate a workbench or a nanoreplicator or something, and the console has to unfold and turn on — and then turn off and fold back up when you're done.  This is fine, except you have no choice but to sit and watch the animation, sometimes even while monsters are running after you.  It's a fundamental rule of user interface design that the interface should remain responsive to the user at all times, and this applies extra to games.  Interruptions of user control should be under half a second unless unavoidable.

But the gameplay's not all bad.  The combat engine is pretty fun; the mutant "necromorphs" are minimally affected by damage to the body, so the best thing to do is to target limbs and heads, which you can blow off freely.  Having a roomful of legless torsos slowly clawing their way along the ground toward you is damn creepy, and sometimes downright fun.  The variety of enemies is also interesting: some are straightforward lurching zombies, but there are also versions that scuttle along the ground like scorpions, as well as a disembodied infected head that will sprout tentacles and fling goo at you from long range.  In some cases, infected bodies have become merged into the ship's walls and function as security cameras.  Creeeeepy.

I also have nothing bad to say about the in-game map system.  In addition to a slick, 3-D minimap of your current area, you can also press a key to display a lighted path showing you the route to your next objective.  I'm sure things like this are increasingly becoming standard in modern games, and I say keep it up.  That feature spared me the usual hours of hair-pulling frustration that come with wandering around and trying to figure out where I'm supposed to go next.

Also, the sequences in vacuum and zero-gravity are pretty fun.  In zero-g, you have grav boots that let you walk normally most of the time, but you can also jump to any other flat surface, even if it was formerly the ceiling.  There are some good vertigo-inducing sequences that take advantage of that, although it's easy to get confused about which way is up.

So, like I said, there's a lot to like about Dead Space, but also more than its share of flaws.  One flaw which isn't specific to this game, but that I'm sure I'll mention frequently, is the general limitations of consoles and the dumbification of games that are designed for them.  Playing Dead Space, it's pretty clear that it's trying very hard to reproduce the successes of System Shock 2, from the zombie-infested spaceship and the upgradable weapons right down to psi powers.  But you know what?  System Shock 2 had a more detailed and complex upgrade system ten years ago.  Sure, it didn't have bump-mapped, vertex-shaded models with 50,000 polygons, but it required thought, not just fast reflexes.

Recommended reading for the developers: cracked.com's Gamer's Manifesto and The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey.