You’ve read the hype, but what about the reality?

The following was my response to a pal asking me how the game was, and it paraphrases the game perfectly:

There was not one single thing during Dead Space (includes ending) that was not 100% predictable or otherwise obvious. Was the ending decent? That depends. It was step-by-step by the books, but was it executed well? Sure. It’s kind of like grading a test though.. how well did they follow the steps?

Dead Space: The Gist

What steps am I talking about? If you’ve watched a horror movie in the past 20 years, you’ll know. I’m talking about the by-the-books bag of tricks that all horror movies take from: things such as when something jumps out to give a cheap scare, the sound effects that are used to keep you unnerved, and even the music to heighten a scene.

Add to that every cheap trick that any “scary” game has ever used, such as when you’ll get attacked, or when something quickly runs by up ahead only to vanish, and other such norms, and you have Dead Space’s repertoire that leaves no cliche unused (and in some cases, blatantly abused).

EA took hold of this bag’o tricks and dug in like a little kid on Halloween. Dead Space isn’t bashful of upending this bag and using everything that falls out. EVERYTHING. I do not lie nor exaggerate when I say that the game even goes so far as to clearly use the Psycho “reak!, reak!, reak!” sound. Regularly (at least in the beginning. maybe I grew deaf to it after awhile or it eventually stops using the sound).

Audio

Like the game as a whole, it’s not that the audio is bad, it’s just that no originality was to be found. The music could have easily been taken from any 80’s (or 90’s) horror movie, while the sound effects and extra-loud volume always kicks in when you’re fighting anything. It doesn’t matter how simple the fight is. It could be a single little monster. The “Oh My Gosh I’m Being Chased By Monsters!” effects will begin playing and the volume will suddenly be twice as loud as it should be.

Game Play

Dead Space is Resident Evil on an abandoned space craft. It’s that simple. There is no further need to explain the controls or how the controls feel. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Personally, I got annoyed at the fact that you can’t so much as switch guns without stopping to wait for the animation to play out, but that’s the way that these kind of games go.

That said, there were some sequences during the game that I found to be especially frustrating. Occasionally your character will be grabbed by a giant tentacle and you must shoot the one large vulnerable spot on the tentacle to destroy it. This is all well and good, but unfortunately the folks at EA took the path of “frustration equals difficulty”: Your camera shakes violently and your gun becomes very difficult to control.

I understand the idea behind this, and had it been executed well then it would have been fine. It wasn’t. Often times even the beams of light with which you aim would be pointing off at a 90 degree angle, completely out of whack with where the gun was actually shooting.

When you fail to take out the tentacle you’re treated to a long, dramatic death animation as your character is pulled into a small dark hole and struggles to escape but ultimately fails. It’s cool at first, but not when you’re repeating the scene for the 4th or 5th time because the good-for-nothing laser lights are shinning off into the wild blue yonder and you have no idea where in the hell you’re shooting.

There is one of these scenes in particular that made me want to set down my controller and call it quits. This is because in addition to the above, all of your controls are also reversed. So you have the shaky camera, the seemingly unresponsive controls, the beams of light that defy physics, and now up is down, down is up, left is right, and right is left.

If that sounds frustrating, you couldn’t be more right! I about had it at that point, and it didn’t help that the death sequence was longer than usual.

Technical Issues

There were two very noticeable technical problems that I had with Dead Space:

1.) When you finally make it to the ship’s Bridge you walk down a very short incline, take a right, and enter a door to get into the actual control room. The entire ship vanished, with the exception of the inside of the control room, while walking back up to the bridge proper. The visual result is that my character was walking on nothing out in the dead of space while the control room (and bits and pieces of the rest of the general area) floated in space with me.

2.) At one point I backtracked to hit a save before a fight. This required taking an elevator back up to a previous level. The game slowed down massively when the elevator began to move. It was so extreme that I honestly became concerned that my XBox 360 was about to die. Luckily that wasn’t the case, and when the elevator stopped at the top the game began once again playing at full speed.

That was the only time that I experienced this level of slow down, though smaller moments were experienced at a couple of other points.

Conclusion

EA played it safe from start to finish. There is not one ounce of originality in Dead Space. It’s set on a derelict space craft filled with (what are effectively) zombies and they used every cliche in the book to drive it to the most predictable ending possible. Were it a movie rather than an interactive video game I would have fallen asleep.

So it’s like I said: It’s kind of like grading a test. Did they follow the steps well?

The answer is that it should be impossible to make a mistake when you’re being as deliberately – even blatantly – unoriginal as EA was with Dead Space, and that holds true. Though way over used through out the game, they did manage to use these standard props very well indeed. Were I grading a test I would leave them a note to suggest that they not write their essay quite so dryly, but would easily give them a perfect score.

Is that a good thing? My opinion is probably clear from the tone of this review – I was bored to death rather than scared to death during the entire game – but obviously many people have enjoyed Dead Space despite its formulaic construction.

And really, it’s not a bad game. The voice acting is done well, the graphics – though mostly identical through out the ship – are quite nice, the audio is of a good quality.. it’s all well executed.

There’s just not a single drop of originality to be found anywhere through the entire experience that is Dead Space. Not in any technical aspect, not in the story telling, not in … anything.

The game is OK, but don’t buy into the hype.

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