by Ravi Sinha
EA Redwood Shores and their premier blockbuster horror actioner Dead Space (the Xbox 360 version reviewed here) brought forth the main concept. What if we took a maddening romp through Neverland on alien infectious LSD, with the strategic dismemberment of limbs played out against the backdrop of big-budget environments and surreal sound? It was always a worrying thought for me – what happened if the vision became larger than the game, so much as to side-track it entirely? Or – horror of horrors – what if the game was little more than a beautiful mess with little core gameplay to sink into?
Thankfully, Dead Space the game is as compelling, addictive, exciting and challenging as Dead Space the story. At times it feels as if both axioms are melding together into a grotesquely vivid medium of dementia, and at other times, little more than the top-notch production values will hold your interest as you tear through some repetitive fire-fights.
You play as Isaac Clarke, a mute space engineer working with the CEC, a mining corporation who’s supposed magnum opus, the “planet cracker” Ishimura is supposedly experiencing technical difficulties. However, spurred by the mysterious SOS of one holographic and sassy Dr. Nicole, Isaac and his admittedly chatty crew-mates discover an infestation of Necromorphs – mutilated, alien creatures dependent on alien flesh. As you’re separated from the crew, you’ll be battling hordes of these agile monstrosities, working to salvage the Ishimura, and subsequently discover that the Necromorphs and the 1000-strong missing crew of the vessel have much more in common than the inherent madness they revel in let’s on.
But as in the cinematic snuff-fest of 1997 yore, limbs are severed, blood is present in floods that dwarf any river Moses could ever enchant, and graphic images of torture, insanity, and plain mutilation are slapped on in moments of calm and chaos alike. If you’re a seasoned veteran of shooters, you won’t find anything too squeamish but individuals who can’t handle the immense psychological grinding should be advised. And kids should just go back to GTA IV or something. The implication is much stronger than the explicit images suggest.
The story is told through a mandatory opening cut-scene but after that, every plot twist is seamlessly integrated into the game via holographic displays of characters speaking, audio logs of the Ishimura’s ship-mates as they spiral slowly into traumatic mayhem, and text files of deceased crew members and their “out-of-the-ordinary” deaths. You’ll often find yourself caught in the middle of an opposing debate between your crew members, facilitated as much by their reliance on you aiding their survival as you are on following their various commands and objectives.
Dead Space follows a perspective similar to Gears of War or even Resident Evil 4. Your basic view is over the shoulder, though you can rotate the camera a full 360-degrees in any direction. On selecting your weapon, you either aim with the Left Trigger and fire with the Right Trigger (aiming is done via the Right Analog stick in this mode; you can, however, still move in this position) or you can simply hit the Right Trigger and Right Shoulder buttons for a melee attack and boot-stomp respectively.
Conserving ammo becomes important in many cases, so there’s plenty of incentive to blow your foe’s head off and then rush in while he’s dazed and smack or stomp the bejesus out of him. You still risk being hurt if an enemy is simply baiting you, in which case you’ll be locked in a button tap-fest to release their hold on you. Depending on your health, you’ll either push them away or heave one to the floor for a good old field goal kick or bear witness to a unique dismemberment of your own each time. The Necromorphs can also play possum by, say, posing as a corpse in that pile of enemies you just annihilated. Granted, this is no Gears but you can never be too sure in space.
Later in the game, you’ll obtain the ability to slow down enemies and objects to either gain a combat advantage or pass through otherwise hazardous obstacles and solve normally inexplicable puzzles.
And then there’s the kinesis ability that allows you to pick up objects like explosive canisters to introduce your enemies a different kind of infernal realm. Before you go “copy-cat”, no, you cannot lift up live enemies and hurl their bodies into their comrades or off notoriously high scaffoldings or into notoriously maiming gyros and gears ala the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2.
You can, however, make use of more rudimentary guns like the Plasma Cutter, which bluntly severs either a leg or arm depending on its orientation; the Pulse Rifle, which is your de facto machine gun fitted with an area attack alternate fire; the Flamethrower, which is good for incinerating smaller, more numerous Necromorphs; and the Line Gun which, while shooting an admittedly weak burst of energy forward, can also project a floating mine that phases an enemy’s flesh right off it’s body. You can modify these weapons at different work-shop benches where you can fit various nodes onto your weapon for more damage or ammo capacity. You can also gain credits all throughout to purchase new weapons, which download themselves on to the virtual store console in the form of scattered schematics you pick up in various areas.
In need of a particular gimmick, Dead Space has you dismembering your enemies in order to kill them. This is justified by the unique and funky tactics that that Necros adopt – if they lose their legs, they can either hurl themselves at you or sprout a scorpion tail-like appendage to whack you. Not even head-shots slow these suckers (literally) down, as they simply charge at you with abandon.
What they lack in intelligence they make up with in sheer toughness and numbers – and that brings me to one of the few major detriments of Dead Space. Except for a few new enemy types thrown in every now and then to mix things up, most of the combat centers around dismembering your foes. If you kill them fast enough, they stay dead. Hence, their forced evolutions or breeding of numerous little critters to hunt you is more of a matter of how fast you can kill them and are not integrally linked the overall game, like how you had to burn the bodies of zombies in Resident Evil (GCN) lest they come back as faster and stronger Crimson Zombies.
Those aforementioned evolutions also obliterate any advantage that shooting off an enemy’s limbs would have in any other action title – why, for instance, must I cleave off a Necro’s legs if it gives it the ability to lunge at me? Why conserve ammo by shooting limbs rather than the main body to kill an enemy when the latter is simply easier (and it’s not like the guns take forever to reload)? Now that I think of it, how is it that one limb-shot would some times kill a foe while several body shots or assorted dismemberments would not? This makes the combat seem more like random attack encounters of blood and guts rather than intelligent tactics being employed against a threatening new species.
But for whatever nagging I had strictly fixed on Dead Space’s gun fights stayed when sized up against the drool-inducing graphics. Dozens of damaged light sources flicker on and off, causing respective shadows and impressions on Isaac. Realistic steam exudes from tired machinery, quarantined facilities lose all lighting before facing brutal infiltration by hungry Necros and environments on the outer hull of the ship offer the most photo-realistic depiction of the blackness of space to date. Character models are well-proportioned, realistic and animated beautifully, whether its Isaac’s hunched walk as he solves puzzles, the shivering hands of the blind woman who bestows Kinesis on to you and begs for salvation or the creaking, stilted limping of the Necromorphs as they first acknowledge your presence before maniacally dragging their frames onto your flesh.
Each and every texture is beautifully and realistically rendered fashion, aided in no small part by the tense orchestral score that blares whenever you’re under attack. The voice-acting is no slouch either – the audio logs feature taut voice work from professional psychologists and crumbling captains to terrified doctors and patients minutes before their deaths. Isaac has no dialogue, though he seems adamant on challenging Link (The Legend of Zelda) for the crown of manliest of grunts. Also impressive is how EA Redwood Shores realistically modeled the sounds of gun fire, movement and bullet-hitting-flesh in an atmosphereless vacuum. Of course, you’ll never fully appreciate the union of sound, animation, and visual beauty until you enter the epochal zero-G areas. Words fail at the sheer austerity, the magnitude of effort that went into conceiving and flawlessly executing these stages…and yes, it easily scores over Prey’s disorienting vertigo fests with its simplicity and symphonic ease of navigation. Who new such an impressive area could be so basic, yet so…well, mind-blowingly impressive?
Dead Space carves its own niche with taut artwork, direction and despite its inspiration, story development. You’ll most likely tire of “strategic dismemberment” after mauling your 30th Necromorph, but each encounter is nonetheless made exciting by the brilliant environments and graphics. Navigating the levels feels neither like a chore nor a piece of cake, despite the way-point system that automatically directs you to your next objective. It’s a nice tough, one that’s neither shoved into your face to compensate for broken level design (I’m looking at you, Perfect Dark Zero) nor unavailable if you get disoriented in the dark.
Dead Space constantly pushes you to the edge, driving at your perception of horror and then pushes you till you can endure no more. It may not offer anything terribly new in its action, but for the most part, this is one deep space adventure you have to experience to believe.
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