Dead Space PC

The guy's helmet. That's all that made this game distinctly different for me before it was released. Because other than that it seemed like Doom 4. Now having played it, I feel my guess was right.

It's an action horror game in space. Like Doom. I've never been scared of the whole Alien space horror genre. This science fiction horror thing just seems too "cool" (with all these H.R. Giger Aliens with sleek designs and lasers flying around like Star Wars) to be scary for me outside the cheap sudden startle moments.

I've been hearing lots of people talk about how scary the game is and basically general praise towards how well it's done. Maybe it's the PC version but I don't agree at all. First off, the mouse lags behind terribly causing controlling to be fairly annoying. You get used to it in-game but the menus suck, just like in Fable 2. Oh and I'm not playing this with the XBOX 360 pad since I finally bought the Microsoft box and have the controller in use there. Maybe I should have played Dead Space with it since the mouse and keyboard combo just doesn't feel as good. But nothing would've helped the fact that when aiming with a weapon your vertical axis slows down, probably to try and help you with the cutting off limbs mechanic, but it's just more annoying than intuitive.

One thing I have to mention in the beginning here is the absolutely terrible narrow field of view and camera angle. The idea, I believe, was to create a claustrophobic feeling inside the ship and have the monsters feel like they REALLY get in your face at close range. The problem is you don't see enough and can't show the player anything really magnificent. They do try though but many times you actually miss it. Some people have said they don't mind the FOV being zoomed in like that and some have said they really dislike it. Having it zoomed in like this makes you lose sense of 3-dimensionality a bit too which makes things look almost orthographic at times and making sense of big rooms becomes more difficult than it should be. There aren't many big rooms in the game and the linearity might turn some people away (no, the guidelines on the ground weren't really needed) but a game like this wouldn't work in wide open spaces. The camera angle doesn't help either. Resident Evil 4 did it right, Gears of War 2 did it right. In Dead Space the camera is way too low making your character basically cover up the whole left side of the screen.

There are a lot of clichés here. An empty space station with audio logs and baby demons was done in Doom 3 (games never have any young kids you can kill, but demon babies are OK), flesh monsters running around that were once human but were infected with a virus and some crazy bad guy thinking this all has something to do with religion and Gods. But there are also unique concepts which I just feel aren't used well enough.

The no gravity zones and space areas don't offer anything new. Jumping from surface to surface in the no gravity zones was a let-down for me. Before the game was out I thought you could fly around freely and get this nice "they can attack from anywhere!" feeling going, but having started the game and realizing how the character controlled I realized the mechanic was going to be something different or it would feel too stiff to control. What it turned out to be was boring and it makes you lose track of where you were going too much with the way the camera handles. A smoother flow to it would've helped for example. The space areas just deplete your air reserves and muddles out sound a bit but in reality you can't hear anything in space. That didn't stop George Lucas though.

The monsters are a simple bunch. Shoot off limbs to win. In a way it's interesting and new but when you can't really kill them any other way (you can but it's so much easier to chop off limbs) it will get a bit repetitive. The weapons cater to that end a lot though and despite them being a fairly unique set, they just don't have as many uses. All I did was use the weird chainsaw gun contraption from start to finish. Oh and the monsters not following you through closed doors is a mood stopper to an extent.

The sound effects are something to be highly praised here. They are absolutely magnificent and have power to them that games rarely have. When you stomp your foot down on a crawling monster you really get the sensation that what your doing is crushing bones. The ambience effects are slightly overdone though, not that the effects are bad, just that there's too much going on. It's interesting to listen to no doubt but I would've gone with a more subtle mood and emphasized on the scary moments.

Speaking of scary moments, this is no Silent Hill. All the scares you'll get are sudden startles when a monster jumps out from behind a corner or your communication device goes on and one of the other characters sends you a message. Yes, the sound from a beginning video transmission is a bit too loud and imposing. OK, it needs to get your attention but pacing them during quiet moments would've been enough anyway. While we're at it, there's been talk about the pacing in general. Some say it's good and others don't really agree. I feel it works (you get quiet moments and then fights) but it's a bit dull. You don't have any real puzzles to solve (slowing time and moving things around aren't interesting core gameplay mechanics because they have been done to death and neither of these are used to create actual puzzles where you have to think longer than 2 seconds) and all you're basically doing is running around linear passages shooting monsters every now and then within very precise time intervals. It's more like a 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes loop instead of having more variety.

The lack of a HUD is excellent. Your information is shown on your character's back and it works very well. You can manage your inventory, look at the map, see audio logs, etc. through a menu that opens up next to you as a 3D plane like in Midnight Club LA for example. It's pretty neat. Other than that the inventory sucks. You don't have enough space (even though you can expand the available slots by buying a new tier of armour) and thus have to choose what weapon to gather ammo for and make room for health packs. The idea of a mechanic like this is obvious from the plethora of games that came before Dead Space but I've always hated it. Give me Simon the Sorcerer's hat!

The animation is done well except for a few interpolation glitches in taking off and landing (of the player character and enemies) in no gravity areas. The story is full of boring "fix the engines" types of missions and at one point we even get an attempt to match the Bioshock botanic garden type of environment (I'm not saying plants haven't been done before Bioshock) but it doesn't deliver apart from the amazing coughing monsters that just sit around and spread toxins into the air. The lack of real life items also makes this feel too sci-fi to my tastes. Star Wars always had the nightclubs, music and a good scope of human emotions but Dead Space only has a soda vending machine. It doesn't feel like an authentic environment despite the few benches here and there. It's a hard subject to get into because obviously there are medical labs and similar areas but all in all it gives off a sense of being generic and simply too sci-fi as stated above.

Supposedly this engine is up for sale and was supposed to compete with Epic's Unreal Engine but I don't see it as battling in the same league at all. Epic's engine looks so much better and runs smoother. I haven't seen the developer tools for this one though so who knows. Anti-aliasing (even though clearly present in the options) and anisotropic filtering don't seem very good and you actually get quite blurry visuals at times, and finally the textures are very low quality often (this is most likely due to the fact that it's supposed to run on consoles too and them having less memory causes problems if porting something that was tuned for PC usage only). Having played Gears of War 2 now just strengthens my opinion.

The game does keep you coming back for more for some reason and even though the general theme doesn't interest me one bit after Doom 3, I just can't help but come back to it wanting to find out what happens in the end. I'm very close to the end now but I have a strong feeling that nothing interesting or unique will happen and the game will just be brushed off as another Doom clone.