I didn’t do it, I swear! They were like that when I got there!

I haven’t done much in a while, but I don’t need to explain myself to you Blog readers!

So, games. I’ve been recently playing Dead Space, Fallout 3, and Red Alert 3. Might not cover them all, but I’ll cover Dead Space that’s for sure. I will cover, the Plot, the Gameplay, Presentation, and Miscellaneous stuff.

Occasionally, they will be waiting right behind the door.

Some have the courtesy of just waiting for you to kill them though.

Plot

Simple story. Undead space zombies. The player character, Issac Clarke, is no special forces dude who’s had a history with zombies. Nope. He’s just a regular space repairman dude. The game takes place mostly on the USG Ishimura, the largest and oldest planet cracker in the fleet. These are basically giant mining ships that take large parts of a planet and mine them until the entire planet is used up. Obviously there’s a lot of processes in this and they try to make sure that whatever planet is grinded up will no have an adverse effect on the rest of the solar system. The premise is that the Ishimura sends a distress call and the USG Kellion, a small shuttle, is dispatched. To add some personal motivation in it, Isaac had a relationship with a medical officer named Nicole previously, and she happens to be stationed on the Ishimura now. Go go obligatory romance. Now, it’s not that bad because there’s no passionate kiss scene or anything. It’s just in the background and pops up now and then. The plot isn’t really original but whatever. It works, it’s solid, and there’s nothing annoying or rage-inducing about it. 7/10

You want spoilers? Well too bad.

Gameplay

Gameplay is similar to Resident Evil 4 but improved. It’s third-person and controls are very smooth. As usual, the Japanese do something good and the Westerners make it more user-friendly/less a pain in the ass. You have to hold a button to aim; for PC that’s RMB. You have two melee attacks, LMB for punching/thrashing, and Space for stomping. Former is good for pushing them away sometimes, while the latter is for breaking boxes or using stasis and stomping them. You have a wide variety of guns that have secondary functions, and no gun is quite the same. Furthermore, while you can certainly just kill things the old fashioned way, the game and enemy design favors cutting off their limbs. Aside from requiring fewer shots, it also disables them and takes a chunk off their HP. Stasis is used as a tool in puzzles occasionally, and has lots of use in comat. It effectively slows down the enemies you use it on, and has a slight area of effect which is really good. You also have Kinesis, which is mostly used for puzzles though you can crab explosive cans, which are not quite as common as they are in most games, and throw them at people. Less explosive objects can be used but aren’t nearly as strong. There are quick-time events in the game, but they are less a case of PRESS DIS BUTAN and more regular gameplay with a slight quirk. For instance, you are grabbed by a tentacle at one point in the game. How do you get free? Well, you take out your gun and shoot at the weak spot. Except, you are down on the ground or dangling so aiming is tricky. It really captures the feel of it, since you wouldn’t have an easy time aiming your weapon in those scenarios. The enemies are very good for zombies. They come in many flavors, and the AI is rather good. For example, most of the enemies and use the vents to get around. Furthermore, playing on normal or above generally has them duck into a vent if you have a clear shot at them and they’re rather far. After a few seconds, they’ll generally pop out of a vent behind you. This can be abused as they cannot go through doors and will go through the vents to get at you if you’re in another room, and the room only has one vent.

Puzzles are rather nice. They range from simplistic (Stick this energy block in the energy receptacle to open the door) to somewhat less obvious (Destroy four energy tethers, two of them are outside but you can’t quite see them unless you look at the computer display). It’s not really frustrating unless you are unable to stop and ponder why you keep dying. Zero-gravity sections play a large part in puzzles as well as a few combat sections. While functionally the same, leaping to another wall opens up a large amount of possibilities.

Anyway, superb all around. 9/10

Presentation

Excellent. Awesome. Spectacular. First off, the interface. It’s all ingame. Aside from the ESC menu and Save Terminals, everything is in real time. This means you can be attacked while browing your inventory or using the shop. The game doesn’t do this to you a lot, but it means you can’t just start using your menu with a bunch of enemies beside you. Of course, the game has hotkeys. Weapons are 1-4, Q uses your weakest healing item (I’m rather surprised they got this right the first time, rather than 2-3 games down the line.), etc. Not everything has a quick-key function, but you can assign them in the PC version. Anyway, less about gameplay. The interface has a very well polished look and is basically a projected hologram. Your HP is measured by a spinal meter, and stasis by a half-circle beside it. The visuals and audio are both superb. The former captures the atmosphere of a grimy, dirty industrial ship yet has its pristine stereotypical sci-fi sections such as the Medical Deck, the Bridge, or the Crew Deck, albeit splattered in blood and other things. Effects are good, and enemies are well detailed and have a very distinct look to each of them. The audio is likewise excellent, from setting the atmosphere and mood to the sound of weapons and enemies. The music changes when enemies attack, but it doesn’t take away from the surprise of it due to the good AI. There’s nothing special about it, it’s just good. Perhaps the best thing is just the setting and story. Rather than the usually ultra-clean sterile science fiction ship, the Ishimura is an industrial ship. It’s noisy, dirty, and uncomfortable. People wear functional clothing, from simply having functional looks to the life monitor mounted along the spine. It’s got a real feel to it despite being a space zombies game. 10/10

Miscellaneous

Not much else to mention here really. The game is rather linear, and you do revisit places, but the reason given makes sense and the place is not the same as before. A bunch of body bags in an earlier chapter are later found to be empty, organic growths cut off access to certain parts, etc. Dead Space is a port of console games but this is probably the best port I’ve ever played. You can alt-tab out of it easily, it plays smoothly with no problems, and it doesn’t even need very good computer specs to run at high or max settings. There are four bosses, one of which you will encounter twice.

The upgrade system is robust and requires multiple playthroughs to upgrade everything as there are not enough power nodes to upgrade it in one playthrough. With weapons, you upgrade the damage, ammo capacity, speed, reload speed, and special abilities such as Mine for the Line Gun or Charge Time for the Contact Gun. You can upgrade the range of your Kinesis, which isn’t a big deal. Your stasis can be upgraded to make it last longer and give you more uses of it. Your RIG, or rather your suit, can be upgraded to give you more Air and more HP. Additionally, you can buy higher level suits, which expand your inventory and the amount of armor it has. Power nodes can also be used to open certain doors. The rooms beyond usually carry a large amount of ammo and items, occasionally a schematic you can add to the store for new items, and vendor trash.

Difficulty varies. Easy is, well, easy. You never really fear death as you have more than enough money to keep yourself fully stocked. Normal is also rather easy, just less so. Hard is where it gets challenging, as enemies are slightly tougher than Normal and you will expend more ammo to take them down. Impossible goes even further, as limbs take 2-3 shots to take off, and enemies are even more aggressive than before. Impossible is unlocked after one playthrough of any difficulty. Furthermore, you can load a cleared game and restart with everything you had, though you cannot change the difficulty.

Afterthoughts

The game is not revolutionary, it’s evolutionary. That’s not a problem. I’d much rather have a derivative game that’s fun and well-polished than a game that takes the genre to new places but plays poorly and has bugs up the ass.

Final Rating: A-

What, did you expect an average of the scores?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Games, Reviews.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.