Dead Space

By krac
14:49 Jan 27, 2009

Immersive with stunning visuals and no HUD.
Superb sound effects and music.
Text, world design, and acting create a great and believable world

Combat failed to impress
Horror didn't quite get me sweating

Dead Space is a survival horror game with fantastic environmental visuals, a convincing world, and driving story line, but is marred by a sloppy console port and a slight failure to hit the “scare” factor.

I should point out that I will make the comment that Dead Space failed to really scare me, despite trying very hard, but I could take some of the blame for that perhaps. My monitor doesn’t have great contrast so dark areas sometimes seem too light, or have blotchy artefacts and I played the game on medium difficulty, rather than my customary hard so that I could beat the game without being caught on anything frustrating, which in turn meant that I probably wasn’t properly concerned about monsters jumping out at me. The last thing that probably contributed to my lack of concern was the fact that I was playing the censored Australian version. Thanks to the drooling chimpanzee called Michael Atkinson holding down the South Australian Attorney General position we can’t have R-rated games. They either have to tone down to MA15+ or they are banned. “Games are for kids, they shouldn’t BE R-rated” he hoots and dribbles as he flings his own faeces (all true, I was there.) I don’t know for sure what was censored, but I suspect it was “the fun.”

The Dead Space plot is one of my favourites, but not terribly new – the large “planet cracker” Ishimaru has lost communications so a repair team is sent out to fix their communications array (or whatever the problem may be.) Soon after landing on the Ishimaru, though, it becomes apparent that the crew has been dismembered, or their faces sucked off, or turned into blood splotches on the walls. You play Isaac-the-engineer-guy who gets separated from the rest of the repair team and then spends the next 20-30 hours wandering around the giant space ship with only a radio, dead bodies, and monsters for company (oh, and the occasional survivor – but they’re not the chatty sort, usually laughing manically and killing themselves shortly after you find them.)

The first thing you’ll notice about Dead Space is the lack of a HUD. This is one of the best innovations I’ve seen in a game in a while and I hope it sticks to other games (Mirror’s Edge is going for a similar feel so maybe I’ll get my wish.) Any information you need can be accessed in the game world. For example your hitpoints are represented by a coloured bar on your RIG (suit), and your stasis (energy) bar is a little dial. Ammo counts can be seen on a readout on the weapon itself, and the targeting reticule is a beam of light projected by the gun itself.

It helps that in the Dead Space world holographic projections have become very popular. Video logs appear as a holographic projection in front of your face, hovering in the actual game world (allowing you to pan the camera and watch the video from the back-side if you so chose), as does the map. Door locks are also holographic handles projected into the middle of the door, and all computer consoles are simply black panels until they turn on, then a holographic screen projects itself for you to interact with. It’s slick, well done, and really improves the experience.

The second thing you’ll notice in Dead Space is that the camera is not situated directly behind Isaac. Someone watching me play asked immediately if you could change that (the answer is no) but you soon get used to it and it’s entirely necessary to make the no-HUD mechanics work. I appreciated the difference it brought, but sticklers might not like it.

The third thing you’ll notice, if you have it on PC like me, is that the mouse control is sluggish and lagged. It’s clearly ported from a console and the aiming mechanism didn’t smoothly carry over to mouse. I eventually actually came to appreciate it, because it made getting precise hits on the monsters a bit harder (if I had a fully responsive mouse I think killing the baddies would have been terribly easy.) The menus, such as at save points, are ridiculously hard to use because of the bad mouse control so it’s much easier to just use the keyboard to navigate the menus – you know, like on a console. EDIT: I have since learned that this may have been a bug related to V-Sync.

The environments are definitely Dead Space’s best feature. The Ishimaru is broken up into sections – Flight Deck, Medical Deck, Engineering, etc, - and these correspond to “levels.” But each deck or level is entirely convincing in what it is supposed to be. More than once I caught the tram between decks and wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to where I was headed – I was just following the holographic line I’d projected onto the floor – but after wandering around a little I could say “ohhh, this must be engineering or something.” It’s pretty well done when you can tell without being told.

You’re going to see lots of ship corridors, but they’re not repetitive at all, and then they go ahead and mix it up with some zero-G and vacuum sections to spruce things up. Yes, that means walking around on the hull of the ship. Sometimes it’s because of a broken section so to navigate past it you’ll need to go through the hole and cross the debris and back in, but other times it’s just because you need to go outside so you simply wander past the field that is holding the air in and start clanking around out there. There is a slight gameplay element to it – you have limited air in your suit. Sometimes you will be waiting for a door to seal as the last few seconds of air tick away and with a 'pshhht' you just survive. In zero-G you’re a bit slower due to magnetic boots, but you can jump from wall to ceiling or anywhere inbetween and magnetise yourself to that surface, spinning the room around – but really it’s the feeling of zero-G and the vacuum that is done well. The different animations of your magnetic boots, the silence of the vacuum (laboured breathing excepted), and the visuals of space and a broken planet below are just stunning.

The second best feature, behind the environments, is the background world. The Ishimaru is a “Planet Cracker.” Earth and its colonies needs a lot of metals and resources, so surveyors find likely planets, set up a colony on the surface for the 5-7 year operation and then send in the planet cracker. This giant ship then enters orbit and rips a hole out of the planet about the size of a continent, creating an instant asteroid field out of the debris, and mines it piecemeal. Rinse and repeat until the whole planet is gone. I thought that sounded pretty cool, but the environments are good enough to convince me that I was actually there checking it out – and it was impressive.

They’ve tried to do something a bit different with combat, but I wasn’t all that impressed. Here’s the deal: You can just shoot the baddies as per normal, but if you happen to knock a limb off they’ll take a ton of extra damage. So, naturally, the most efficient way of taking enemies down is to cut two or three limbs off with well placed shots. Especially since ammo is short to give it that “survival” feel, this is fairly important. About half of the guns in the game are some variation on the cutting theme – and the fact that Isaac is an engineer, and not a soldier, fits well with his array of slicers, cutters, and bladey-throwy-things (plus one rifle.)

However, let me give you an example of combat. The best gun in the game by far is a “line cutter.” It shoots out a wave of energy… in a line… that cutters things. So an enemy clambers out of a vent behind you (yes enemies will appear behind you almost like magic to give you a scare, but at least they have to clamber out of a vent) so you spin and they charge. You fire at their knees shearing a foot off their height. All the baddies in the game have spindly, bladed arms that allow them to continue to clamber towards you, even sans legs. So you shoot another line at their elbows and bobs-yer-uncle, they’re dead. The other weapons are generally variations on this, except that the pistol-cutter can only cut off one limb at a time and the explody sort of guns don’t need to be aimed as well – limbs tend to come loose after a few direct hits anyway.

It all gave combat a very precise feel – and combined with the fact that I rarely felt in danger, I thought it detracted from the horror experience. I think the game would have actually been better served by less innovation (not something I will say often) and just sending tough monsters at me and giving me a pile of ammo as a sidekick.

Not that combat wasn’t pretty fun, but the boss battles were stand-out exceptional. They’re very unique and yet easy to work out. I had a blast with them, and normally boss battles are the most frustrating parts of a game. Absolutely top effort from the designers there.

The sound and music direction deserver special mention. The sound track did an excellent job of rising and falling to build suspense as you picked your way through the dark, metallic corridors. A perfect score for the genre. The sound effects are what I really noticed, though. The sounds of the ship all around you were subtle, yet superb. From the moment I set foot on the Ishimaru the sounds of things creeping about was quite unnerving. Well, if I was afraid they stood a chance against my line cutter that is. Still, hearing something clambering through the vent right above you, or a wrench clattering around in the distance after something disturbed it, was enough to make me swing about a bunch of times.

So, once you get used to the few little quibbles at the beginning – which you’ll soon get used to – and if you don’t take it too easy on yourself you should find it a really fun game well worth your time. The story-line is fairly standard fair, but well executed. The combat is a bit lacking, but it is a novel take. The environments and graphics are simply breathtaking, and the no-HUD mechanic is something new and executed perfectly.

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Atomic Magazine

Issue: 133 | February, 2012

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