Looking back at previous articles, I noticed that all my reviews of games are either condemning, or glowing, with nothing in between. So, welcome to my first lukewarm review.

Originally, I wasn’t even going to play Dead Space, but it started popping up in all my favourite blogs and comics, and then a few friends (and also loyal completionist.com readers) hyped it way up, and so Chris and I picked it up last week.

We’re playing through the game episodically every Thursday with some friends, so even though the game isn’t that long (though longer than it should be), it’ll take us awhile to finish it. For that reason, I’ve decided to write about my feelings on the game without having officially completed it. We’re about 7 or 8 hours in at this point, so I think I have enough of a grasp on the gameplay elements to write a semi-informed piece on the subject. So I suppose this isn’t technically a review, it’s more just my impressions so far.

Last night, Chris referred to Dead Space as “a poor man’s Bioshock”, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s not a bad game, in fact I think it’s pretty good, but it’s a far cry from great. Sadly, it failed to live up to my expectations, which unfortunately were hyped up too high. Crazy internet, always getting my hopes up.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s a third person, over-the-shoulder shooter in the survival horror genre. You’re trapped on a space station that you came to save, and there are alien zombies everywhere. Also, you’re looking for your girlfriend, who is probably by this point a zombie-alien hybrid boss that we’ll have to fight later, or at least, that’s what I’m hoping. You have two other members of your original crew on the station with you (the majority of your team was instantly slaughtered on arrival), and they communicate with you as you travel around the ship. Don’t worry, they won’t actually help you with anything, they stay locked away safely in zombie-free rooms and just tell you what your next objective is. As is appropriate to survival horror games, your end goal is to escape alive. However, before you can do that, you have to repair the main engine, which you can’t do without traveling to three different areas to reset breakers, and once you do that you have to get the asteroid deflection system back online, but once that’s done, the oxygen supply system starts to fail, so that has to be repaired, and so on and so forth. Other than the sinister zombie presence, you’re basically an interstellar repair guy. A jack of all trades whose many talents include alien pwnage.

There is an over-arcing storyline that comes in the form of audio logs, and a few videos left around the space station from it’s former crew, slowly unveiling how this travesty befell them in the first place. But honestly, other than providing a distraction from endlessly slogging through zombies to flip yet another switch somewhere, I don’t really enjoy the story. I think part of the problem is that the main character, Isaac, is supposed to have the motivation of searching for his true love, but since he never talks, and has literally no back story, he’s hard to identify with. It’s difficult to project sentimental romantic feelings on a guy you’ve never seen do anything but dismember hordes of aliens.

Dead Space has a gore factor that is pretty entertaining at first, but starts to wear off after a few hours. It’s fun to watch your dismembered torso float off into space, and arterial spurting is always a good time, but they’re not enough to carry a game. We still like stomping on dead guys to make their limbs fly off, and there are still some “Oohhhhh!”s when something gross happens though, which is fairly often. Melee attacks make for some pretty juicy sound effects, and lots of blood everywhere. The combat system is definitely a high point, and takes away some of the tedium of the hack-and-slash-ery. Instead of shooting regular old bullets, you shoot planes of energy, and the quickest way to kill an enemy is by slicing off its limbs (similar to the Resident Evil head-shot concept). If you take off a head first, they get pretty pissed and move to a sort of berserker attack style. That’s just the gun you start off with, though. You collect money and schematics, and can use them at stores around the station to buy new weapons, as well as ammo and health packs. Some weapons are more effective against some enemies, and some less so. I’m a big fan of Ripper blades, which allow you to shoot out a circular saw blade, which stays extended on a laser beam, and you can swing it around slicing things apart. You can carry four guns at a time, and store whatever you’re not using in a safe that you can access through the stores. Also collectible are items called power nodes, which can be used at certain stations to fill out talent trees for your armour and weapons.

Typical to this genre, your inventory space is limited (adds to the tension, don’t you know), and you will often find that you can’t pick up items dropped around you. My biggest problem with this system is that if you are carrying an empty weapon, and walk over extra ammunition for it, you have to go drop another inventory item, then pick up the ammo and load your gun, and then re-claim the item you dropped. This seems like kind of a waste of time, when it would be easy to just have ammunition automatically loaded into an empty gun. In addition to your weapon arsenal, you also have an ability called stasis, which allows you to change everything to bullet time for a few seconds. This is lamely used in some “puzzles” by making you slow down a rapidly opening and closing door so it doesn’t crush you when you walk through, but it can also be used in combat when you’re getting swarmed. Additionally, you have a kinesis ability that is so useless I won’t even bother talking about it.

Bringing up your inventory menu doesn’t pause the game, so if you want to heal while fighting, you’d better be quick about it. (Editor’s note: after posting, we discovered there is a button you can press to use health packs without bringing up your inventory menu) This in itself isn’t a bad idea, as it adds to the stress, but it’s unfortunate that when you try to pull up your inventory screen, the first thing that comes up is the game’s essentially useless map, and the half a second it takes to flip past it can mean death. It can also mean you get annoyed with having to flip past the stupid map every time you want to look at your stuff. The map is a 3D hologram with your correct path highlighted on it, but it’s futuristic-ness just makes it hard to look at. Never fear, though, you don’t need it. A quick button tap highlights the route you need on the floor in glowing blue. I have mixed feelings about this, as part of me feels like it’s a good idea, and part of me feels like it cheapens the experience somewhat. We’ve taken to calling it the “cheat line”, though it is especially useful when you’re in zero gravity stages, which can be kind of confusing without it. The zero-G environments aren’t my favourite, as they impose a time limit (you only have a limited air supply), but I’ll give huge props for the fact that there’s no sound when you’re in a vacuum. Science!

As far as scariness goes, Dead Space didn’t quite live up to my expectations. It has some startling moments, things busting through walls unexpectedly, etc. The creepy violin music that plays during combat is, well, creepy (especially with surround sound), and walking through a room with living walls made of dead and mostly dead screaming people is obviously going to be disturbing, but I’m tempted to say it’s more gory than scary. It definitely has a tension to it, with dark corridors, and that feeling that any second something is going to drop out of the ceiling. If I was playing it by myself in the dark, I might get scared, but compared to games like Silent Hill, or even Condemned, it’s PG-13 (minus all the blood and guts).

Overall Dead Space is a good game, and I’m enjoying it, it just doesn’t do anything quite to the degree I was hoping it would. I’ll let you know if I change my mind after I’m finished with it. In the interim, it’s a decent game, and if you find your queue getting short, give it shot. However in these trying times, there are a lot of games out there, and if you haven’t played Bioshock yet, I’d give that a go before you move on to Dead Space.

A poor man’s Bioshock indeed. There are also some very distinct shades of Mass Effect thrown in for good measure (the whole space theme, the ability to use kinetics, etc.). Both of those games are more successful at what they do than Dead Space is at mashing them together.

The news isn’t all grim, though. Dead Space, while not perfect, is still very capable of delivering a scary survival/horror experience. Another positive is that the game, while borrowing ideas from other games, is itself a new game. To explain that a little better, note that there is no number that concludes the title. It seems that all we see now are sequels and it is refreshing to see a new series…and make no mistake, this will be a series. It’s made by EA, after all…