Dead Space Review

 Okay I will be reviewing Dead Space today, for those of you who do not know it is a Survival Horror 3^rd person shooter set aboard the USG Ishimura. The game follows ship systems engineer Issac Clark as he traverses the ship discovering the truth behind what has happened to both the ship and his long time girlfriend Nicole Brennan while dodging and dismembering grotesque creatures referred to as “Necromorphs” which can only be stopped by cutting their limbs off.

As far as game play goes the game esques the more traditional HUD for something a little more fitting to the setting using hard light holograms to show your ammo and your health displayed on a device called a RIG or Resource Integration Gear that can be seen running down the spine of Issac's armour. Objectives and audio, text, and video logs are displayed as holographicly projected pages that are viewed in real time. The map is also a holographic projection but unlike the objectives and logs is displayed in 3 dimensions allowing the player to pivot and rotate the map as needed to find your objective. The drawback to this is you can be attacked while checking these screens, but personally I like this added flair of realism.

As I mentioned before you can dismember the various enemy you encounter, in fact you must dismember them in order to kill them efficiently. To this end the developers incorporated a “strategic dismemberment” system where different enemies have to be dismembered in different ways. You can eliminate the enemies without taking advantage of this system but it will generally waste time and ammunition and more than likely get you killed.

When it comes to weapons there is really only one military grade weapon, the rest are improvised from the Ishimura's man portable mining equipment. All of the weapons are fitted with a secondary fire mode which can be a huge help depending on what your facing.

Next lets talk about upgrading, as you progress through the game you will come across Power Nodes these Power Nodes can be used at workbenches to upgrade your RIG, weapons and two other items, the Stasis module and Kinesis module. The stasis module is pretty self explanatory, it freezes things temporarily like doors or enemies. The Kinesis module allows you to interact with things from a distance such as moving things or picking them up or even hurling them at enemies.

While progressing through the game you will encounter decompressed portions of the ship, lucky for you your suit is not just an engineering suit its void armour to, so thus it is fully pressurised allowing you to walk through these areas (though I would recommend running). Downside is necromorphs don't breath so you can encounter them in these areas to, also your oxygen supply is limited (though you can upgrade this in your RIG). Personally I think they did the decompressed areas perfectly as there is no sound aside from your own breathing as it should be.

All in all I really enjoyed Dead Space and definitely recommend it.