Dark hallways, noises, with brutal and shocking images and terrifying enemies and an adrenaline filled, survival “I’m about to die”, feeling make for intense gameplay. Never before have I played a game that actually scared me. EA’s sequel to the horror-survival game Dead Space, did just that. I’ve looked down hallways and hesitated to move forward. I’ve slowly made my way through the dark while fighting disturbing enemies. I’ve made my way to the end and uncovered the shocking secrets behind the story of the game. Your mom may hate this game, but as the trailer said, you’ll love it.
First of all, the game throws you right into the action. No slow build up, no big introduction and who’s who. A man shakes you awake in a hospital and tells you that you have to get out of here, then the man dies and turns into some bizarre creature right in front of you. You have to take a quick hint that your name is Isaac Clarke and the creatures crashing through glass doors and parts of the walls are trying to kill you, and if you don’t get away, they will. Which I may add is a lovely way to start a game when you factor in confusion and all the questions that follow. Second, if the reanimated corpses we all know and love called the Necromorphs weren’t bad enough, you soon find out that humans are trying to kill you too. Now that’s a great combination.
Let’s begin with the Necromorphs for the newcomers. As stated earlier but in more detail, they are an alien species that reanimate dead humans and apparently have a GPS with Isaac’s every location in it. All of these events happen because of a giant artifact called a marker. The Necromorphs are derived from it, are attracted to it and worship it. Necromorphs come in all different shapes and sizes. They’re tall and scary, fat and scary, small and scary and teenie tiny…and scary. They are adults, children and even infants which is one of the more disturbing aspects of the game. I never thought I’d see a baby crawling at me in a back bend with a giant, yellow stomach that, well, explodes.
Okay, back to the present. The new setting for the game is in an enormous space city called the Sprawl, probably because if you get to close to the Necromorphs you might find yourself lifeless and “sprawled” out on the floor. The marker, mentioned above, is the cause for the chaos dissolving onto the Sprawl. And guess what, it’s your job to destroy it, lucky you. You meet tons of Necromorphs on your travel to the marker along with some Unitologists, worshipers of the markers and such, a C.E.C. member (C.E.C. stands for Concordance Extraction Corporation, the same corporation Isaac used to be apart of mind you,) and a mental patient from the same hospital on the Sprawl you were blessed to wake up in.
Dead Space 2 tells the story of a man who has had a bunch of tough luck, and has had to witness things that you wouldn’t even wish upon your worst enemy. Now he has to go through more of this terror because he is connected to every problem on board the Sprawl. His job is to stop it and you get very drawn into his character and his past. He lost his girlfriend in the first Dead Space to the Necromorphs, he’s had tests performed on him for three years straight, and everything wants him dead. He’s a man who has basically lost the will to live any longer, but wants to do one last thing to help humanity out, and that means to destroy the marker.
The arsenal and armor is no problem in the game. Plenty of weapons and armor upgrades make themselves available to you at stores, but ammo for the guns and health, not so much. That basically defines the horror-survival genre. Unless you horde credits (the game’s form of money) you will have to fight for your ammo and health by killing an enemy and stomping on its corpse. Pleasant, right? The weapons themselves are a mixture of mining and medical tools. The main gun, the plasma cutter, is a pistol found in the medical wings that specializes in cutting tissue and skin. Since the Necromorphs are sort of human, and you have to lop off their limbs to kill them, it tends to come in handy.
In this new installment, creativity definitely counts for something. Whether it’s using kinesis to levitate objects and hurl them at Necromorphs, using stasis to slow them down and take your time blowing their limbs off, or shooting out the glass of an airlock, sucking all the Necromorphs out into space, and almost sucking yourself out in the process, and then shooting a button to close the airlock. The creativity part works well when you can stasis an enemy, shoot both of its legs off, then impale it with the leg of a table using kinesis, and finish it off via flying out of an airlock. Every time it tends to get more interesting as new ideas to take down these gruesome creatures flow into your head.
Altering how normal third-person shooters look, Dead Space 2 has no HUD what so ever. Everything that would normally make up the HUD, like ammo, health and the inventory is integrated onto Isaac. His health and stasis meter rests on his back, blue meaning full and dropping to red when close to depletion. The ammo count in the gun is only shown on the gun. When changing weapons a holographic image pops up and shows the four weapons you can choose from, and the same thing when you bring up the inventory. The game is not paused. When occupied with anything from upgrade benches to the inventory, the Necromorphs will still attack you. The only haven is a save point.
Dead Space 2 requires you to use your head every once in a while. In order to complete tasks and get to where you need, you may have to fly around in zero gravity, pull out a power source, release and tick off a bunch of Necromorphs, or smash open a fuse to unlock a door. Dead Space 2 eliminated the major back tracking you have to do in the first one. I recall only seeing one area twice but I didn’t go the same way to get there and didn’t exit through the same door.
The game’s graphics are very impressive. All the images are sharp and very dark, integrating itself into the creepiness of the game. The graphics help make the game scarier because how scary would the game actually be if instead of a hi-def reanimated human corpse running at you, it was a mangled mess of blurred color? There is a lot of detail in Dead Space 2, being able to see even the screws on Isaac’s armor. The Necromorphs actually have noticeable features instead of looking at a skin colored figures with four to six skin colored lines protruding from them, you see mutated legs, arms, feet hands, backs, chests, and faces that in a weird sense look real or natural.
Along with the graphics, the game has good scenery. Like in the beginning when you awake in the medical wing, you can actually tell that your in some sort of a hospital instead of something else. All types of scenery are experienced throughout the trek to the marker, like a church, a crypt, a school and even flying, or more like being thrown through, space itself. Walking through the church you’d expect for it to be safe but, nothing is ever a walk in the park. School sounds like a sane place to be but you’d question your judgement there too. A crypt, now that’s just suicide because you are about to knowingly walk through a place filled with bodies just waiting to be reanimated. Respite is never found anywhere and when it seems safe, question it.
The game also uses a lot of scare tactics. It seems to have a lot of fun with it too. When you’re walking down a hallway, in the dark, and know from past experiences that something has jumped out in front of you, you tend to be cautious. Then you realize your just paranoid and take the next few hallways with more courage, only for something to come crashing out of an air vent right next to you and attempt to rip your life from you. There are also nosies that can be very creepy, like the sound of crying babies from behind doors. There are plenty of things to startle you , like crawling in an service duct and rounding a corner to see the legs on a Necromorph scurry on by, or walking down yet another dark hallway to hear things moving above you. But the scariest part is by far is looking out a window into space, and a body comes slamming into it.
The sound in the game adds to the overall feeling you receive from it. The creepy noises the Necromorphers make are one thing but the other sound effects and the music during the game change the intensity. Hallways are completely quiet and all that can be heard are your footsteps and the Sprawl itself creaking. The music is very light and calm until more Necromorphs come to have play time and then it picks up and becomes fast and tense.
A new factor that Dead Space 2 adds is a battle Isaac has with dementia and his inner self. The scenes where Isaac breaks down into a dementia “fit” adds very disturbing images to the already creepy game, assuming something paranormal is happening, only to realize Isaac’s mind is toying with him. The game has a story and this only adds to it. He not only now has to make his way to the marker and destroy it, but now he needs to find a way to conquer himself as well.
One down side is that “boss battles” , if you can call them that, are repetitive. It’s the same two bosses most every battle for an exception of two unique cases. In one of the cases the majority of the battle is a cut-scene battle, stopping for brief moments so you can attack the boss. Another boss you fight for a brief moment only for it to run away and never be seen again.
Suspense is constantly built up in Dead Space 2, and is slowly let out over time. The game has a way of getting you drawn in and, it really never lets you go. When I’d turn off my PS3 to either eat or go to sleep, I’d would hesitate to turn the game back on and keep playing. I wanted to find out what happens next, but I did not want to walk down dark hallways. The game play is very intense and once it captures you, no matter how scary, creepy, or suspenseful it is, you can’t put the controller down. I played the last seven chapters of the game in one sitting, because of how enveloped in the story I got. All in all, it’s a short game. It took only about ten in a half hours to complete the first play through on easy, but depending on the difficulty it may take longer. Once the game is beaten, hardcore mode is unlocked. There is almost no ammo or health and you can only save three times. Dead Space 2 offers the option though to start a new game that carries over all equipment, guns, etc. from the previous playthrough(s.)
Dead Space 2 has a multiplayer but I am unfortunate to have connection problems with my PS3 to Wi-fi. By most reviews I’ve read about the game, the multiplayer greatly lacked necessary aspects to make it good. For a good look at the multiplayer, read the review at www.ign.com.
*based on PS3 version
