Dead Space

[Danny Boy]

One of the best games (In My Opinion) to come out for the Xbox 360
Its a must buy for anyone who is into serious gaming

I've never understood the appeal of scary games -- or movies, for that matter. Considering Dead Space is marketed as a horror game -- "a bloodcurdling interactive horror experience," according to the official site -- I found myself strangely comfortable with it at first. Then I realized something: It isn't really a horror game. Or at least, not a very scary one.

It's clear that Dead Space wants to be scary. It has the right trappings, from the lost-on-a-spaceship concept to the limited health and ammo pickups, the audio and video logs you find (which feature allies screaming at you), and the blood-splattered environments and occasional disgusting enemies. But it seems like -- in a few too many cases -- the designers chose to hold you by the hand and make something look cool instead of making it look scary. When you're upgrading your suit (which itself makes you look more like a game's boss than an everyman), using Stasis to freeze enemies, picking up explosive canisters with the equivalent of a gravity gun, and purchasing weapons that dissect enemies in different ways, you don't exactly feel vulnerable. Mix in more than enough checkpoints and the ability to draw a line in front of you telling you where to go (with the touch of a button) and it's easy to settle in and let the training wheels take care of you.

Assuming you weren't misled into expecting something along the lines of Silent Hill, however, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Dead Space tries to have things both ways by being scary and offering plenty of gunplay, but it's well crafted throughout. I remember debates about whether Resident Evil 4 was as scary as previous Resident Evil games, and the consensus was that no, it wasn't -- but it was better designed, so who cares?

A better description of Dead Space is "a limited-ammo shooter." You spend a lot of time moving through corridors and taking out a few enemies at a time, but the game gets difficult (and really good) when it locks you in a room and forces you to kill everything before moving on. When that happens, you have to use strategies such as freezing a few enemies at a time...and then punching their frozen bodies just to save ammo.

The much-hyped dismemberment system plays into these strategies as well, since you can shoot off enemy legs to slow them to a (literal) crawl or slice off an explosive flesh bag attached to an enemy's arm and then use the gravity gun to fire the bag at a whole batch of foes. It works incredibly well when mixed with the limited-ammo concept, as you can almost always find a way to kill an enemy more effectively than just firing quickly -- which helps keep the combat interesting during the routine corridor sections of the game.

Despite the combat, I still found a few too many similar-looking corridors -- the game is long enough (I clocked in at about 12 hours), but it's pretty much the same thing all the way through, with a few minor minigames, puzzles, and zero-gravity segments (where you go outside the ship and jump from floor to ceiling with gravity boots) sprinkled in. Find a key, unlock a door, move on to the next locked door...then enter a room where you have to kill a bunch of enemies and fight an occasional boss.

Dead Space is at its best when it does things unique to the third-person shooter genre; the aforementioned zero-gravity sequences (which feature fantastic audio effects that make you feel like you're in outer space), the storytelling method (events unfold via hovering video log monitors that you watch as you walk around, rather than through traditional cut-scenes -- and it's much more impressive than the events themselves), and the dismemberment system all come to mind. Apart from the lack of variety within them, the characters and environments are some of the best looking on the market, with blood splatters and rusted metals all over the place.

Dead Space ultimately feels like an incredibly polished and varied 6-hour game stretched out to make it twice that long. While I felt like I was repeating the same objectives a few too many times, the combat held up so well that I didn't even mind...too much.

[Torian]

But I prefer competitive gaming to serious gaming . I'll stick with CoD series.

[Danny Boy]

Oi, Dead Space is one of those games you play when you wanna play by yourself. Away from 13 year olds thinking they rule at everything and rush into a shotgun blast like its just gonna shoot blanks.

[Torian]

But we have masturbation for when we want to play with ourselves. The gaming industry is slowly but surely moving beyond single player experiences into a more multiplayer-centered age. You'd be hard pressed to find games that you'd play by yourself for as long as you did back in the sega genesis days.

[Danny Boy]

Haha, I said "by ourselves" not "with ourselves"
;D
But yeah, sucks for the people who still live in the age of Dial-Up
*horror music plays*

[PunkRock482]

Dead Space hella fun ass game
i was playing with my friend and pwned :]

[Danny Boy]

Yeah, Dead Space 2 is supposed to come out soon and I'm pumped

[Auron4020]

I rented this game a while back and beat it while I was renting it but I still got it because it is a fun game and it keeps on the edge of your seat (at least when you are alone in the dark)

[RobbyTheReaper]

dead space was a good game i liked it

@Torian - i personally don't play online cause xbox makes you pay to play online which is bullshit and cause i don't like playing online at all i personally buy the game to play it with either myself or my friends instead of random others thinking they are king shit of the world and personally i'd rather play the game by myself

[Rundeer]

A sadly overlooked game. The atmosphere is truly like no other.

[Euphoria]

whats the main plot in this game ive seen a few trailer for it like but still not to sure :/

[Rayne 111]

I played it once round a friends house and quite enjoyed it, Scared the crap outta me, but still, was pretty good. But I wouldnt buy it, not my type of game.

[Danny Boy]

whats the main plot in this game ive seen a few trailer for it like but still not to sure :/

You arrive on a deep space mining ship to repair it from damage...but you soon find out its now infested with aliens whom were released by the miners on the ship. Basically you go about finding a way to get off the ship alive