Review: Dead Space

EA Games Offers a solid but Uncompelling Experience

Oct 29, 2008 Daniel Sims

EA Games' Dead Space emulates some of the best games around, but begs the question of whether or not proven devices are enough to create a fulfilling experience.

Electronic Arts' Dead Space plays out like a cross between Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, and System Shock 2, combining elements of shooters, adventure games, and horror.

The setup is your basic sci-fi horror story: players take the role of Issac Clarke – an engineer sent to investigate and repair a mining vessel called the USG Ishimura. Clarke & co. find the ship derelict and infested with monsters and must escape.

Dead Space may lack originality, but it uses what it takes so well that it doesn’t really need to be very original.

What Redwood Shores Got Right: Borrowing from the Best

Dead Space’s basic gameplay, like Resident Evil 4, has players in a third person perspective shooting down large groups of persistent enemies in situations that are designed to be intense.

The one truly “unique” element of Dead Space is how players are supposed to dismember their enemies in order to eliminate them which requires precise aim. That ads an extra element of challenge to the game but doesn’t really impact the end experience that much.

Also seemingly borrowed from RE4 is the ability to buy and upgrade weapons and equipment as players progress through the game.

One of the smartest things about Dead Space is its sense of immersion. Every single piece of the game’s menu interface is incorporated into the real game space not unlike Nintendo’s Metroid Prime games.

Things like health and ammo are displayed on weapons or on Issac himself. All menus and text throughout the game appear as holograms in front of Issac which looks very cool and makes all of Dead Space’s environments just a little bit more believable.

Equally smart in Dead Space is how its story is told. Using no cut scenes, the entire narrative is conveyed through set pieces in the environment as well as radio messages and logs found throughout the Ishimura which slowly piece together what happened onboard – similar to System Shock 2 and its spiritual sequel Bioshock.

The way everything is conveyed along with the above-average voice acting completely saves Dead Space’s story from feeling derivative.

The designers at EA Redwood Shores not only show a very good sense of perception in borrowing from some of the most progressive games out there, but what they have used feels very polished. The controls are some of the tightest around and everything works exactly as it should.

What Redwood Missed - A Real Compelling Experience

Despite all the game’s hard mechanics being designed so well however, Dead Space fails to consistently achieve any true feeling about it. It doesn’t really impress anything upon the player.

If Dead Space is supposed to be an intense survival horror game then it only achieves that title sporadically.

Most of the time players are given more than enough of what they need to handle enemies with little trouble, removing almost any real sense of danger from the game. Only a few specific situations throughout Dead Space deliver true tension.

If Dead Space is supposed to merely be a heavily-atmospheric shooter, then it also falls short there.

Despite a cool interface, appropriately moody lighting, gruesome enemies, and deaths that are even more gruesome, the game never really becomes scary or unsettling. Mostly it ends up relying on things like pop-out monsters and other cheap scares.

Bottom Line

Dead Space achieves near perfection as a game, but fails as an experience. Some who are fans of sci-fi and horror may be ensnared by Dead Space and find it worth buying, but despite its technical and design prowess, it mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions.

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