Dead Space Review

What's this?!?!? Electronic Arts making a decent game that ISN'T a sports game? And you're telling me its a survival horror game? Where the crap did this come from?

Dead Space IS a survival horror game. It IS by Electronic Arts. And it ISN'T that scary. Whoops did I just ruin it? I guess I did.

The game begins with as you crash land on the deck of the USG Ishimura, a mining ship that recently lost all communications. You play as Issac Clarke, assigned to investigate the termination of the ship. As you walk into a room, a quarantine takes effect and all the doors lock. You can only watch as a muntant....thing...pops down out of the ceiling and feasts upon the flesh of your crew.

Oooo that's scary you might say. Dead Space is a game that doesn't scare as much as it's advertised to. Once you see one enemy revive itself from acting dead, you get tired as the set pieces begin to repeat themselves. I found myself looking at a "dead" enemy on the floor thinking.....balls I have no health, two shots left, and there's an enemy about to bite my face off and rape my eye sockets.

The only disturbing feature of the game I found was the variety of ways enemies can disembody your special main character. There's the old fashioned chop my limbs off like I'm the black knight from Monty Python. However, some enemies had horiffic methods to disembowl me. One of which is the squid like thing. Let me just pause here....So I'm playing on Medium mode when the squids arrive. I try shooting them but there's a few of them and they take damage pretty well. Not to mention they're fast as heck. The squids decide to take advantage of my 5% health and jump on my face. In their enjoyment, the squid that was hungriest of all decided to rip my head off. But no he wanted more! He then took it upon himself to stick his long tenticles down into the area where my head used to be, jamming them into my spine and such so that his head was now my head. What made the scene worse was the fact that Issac still had some life in him as he tried desperately to pull the creature off. Yeah that part....was pretty freaky.

The rest of the game is pretty repetitive. In one chapter you have to find a specific type of enemy screwing up the clean air and take care of him. The only problem, there's about 10 of them scattered about an enormous floor of the ship. It seemed to me as if the designers were just trying to lengthen the game to fit it into the 6-8 hour game time slot.

Boss fights are pretty well done though. Especially the one in zero gravity. Zero-G thoughout the game is fairly intuitive and works well for the genre. When you enter a Zero-G zone you have another dimension for enemies to pop out of.

Dead Space is good for a suspenseful night and is best played with the lights out and no ambient noise. It's no Silent Hill 3, but under those circumstances, it can really get the blood pumping. Since I borrowed this game from my friend, I felt I might as well get all of the trophies/achievements for it. It took me a while, Impossible mode was the most annoying, but I perservered. If you play on Easy mode then don't expect any scares at all. Pretty much every enemy dies in one hit its almost laughable.

It's good enough for a rent if you've got an urge for a horror game though I won't suggest buying it since now that I've beaten it on the hardest difficulty I find that there is nothing else I can do in the game. It's not a long lasting game but for the time spent playing it, it's well worth it. Check it out.