Dead Space

I was intrigued by Dead Space. A survival horror set in space seemed like a new concept to me and it received quite a lot of good reviews. What could possibly be not-to-like?

Firstly, the story. You play as Isaac Clarke, a scientist or technical dude (not really sure), on a mission to an unresponsive space craft stranded near a planet that it was exploring. Apparently it is a repair mission so it probably makes sense to bring along a scientist who knows about that sort of stuff. When attempting to dock with the stranded space craft, Isaac and company’s ship is struck by a stray asteroid.

This is where the alarm bells start ringing. Based on the information we are given, this is a fairly standard approach so for the pilot to fuck it up in this manner, is a little surprising. Anyway the ship ends up crashing and the team is laid upon by the alien/undead lifeforms aboard, leaving only the three survivors. Isaac is of course one of them otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a game.

You have the standard Marine-style leader guy, voiced by and styled on Peter Mensah, who is ‘in charge.’ The woman who wants to be ‘in charge’ and constantly slags off the marine guy. And Isaac. The only one of the three survivors capable of doing anything.

From the first moment it is established that you are the only three survivors, the dialogue is essentially, ‘Isaac go here and fix the tram system.’ ‘Isaac, see if you can walk across the exterior of the ship and destroy the giant space slug blocking our comms array.’ ‘Isaac. Can you fight your way through the corridor of undead aliens and restore the fuel supply.’ And my personal favourite; ‘Isaac, my poison didn’t work so you are going to have to go in there and fight the giant alien single-handedly.’

Are you having a laugh you bunch of lazy cunts? Why doesn’t one of you help me out for five minutes? The best bit is that Isaac is the computer technician slash scientist yet the other two spend most of the game time dicking about with computers while you are trying to survive. Another example of this is when, after being given a distress beacon, you have to place it on an asteroid and launch it into space. In the real world, someone like Isaac would have made the beacon and Marine-Mensah would have killed the aliens and done the leg work.

All of this doesn’t really matter though because despite Isaac not having a weapon when walking off of the space craft he is more capable with them than any of the other fucktards who come with you. A room full of aliens is nothing for Isaac if he has a pistol (plasma cutter) and a stasis module.

Isaac’s weaponry and armour are a little against the whole survival horror genre. You have a fully functional suit, a vast array of weaponry and a shop from which you can purchase ammo, medpacks and new weapons at regular intervals. I have to say I was actually a little shocked that they built in a currency and purchase function, especially after my spaceship crashed on a half destroyed mining vessel.

Despite Isaac’s unexplainable abilities with weaponry, his melee attacks are a pile of garbage. He has two; swing into the air, and if you get in the way it’s your own fault; stamp my foot, and if you get in the way it’s your own fault. There is no manual targeting which means you just swing at the same height or stamp on the floor in a really uncoordinated fashion. In order to stamp, you have to use the right should button. To run slightly faster that walking speed, you have to hold the left shoulder button. Getting these two mixed up at certain points of the game mean you instantly die. Which is not fun.

Sound is usually key to a survival horror game but if I’m honest, I didn’t think that much of it. It didn’t build a lot of tension with me because the gameplay mechanics destroy the immersion so if the sound had been fantastic, it would have only served to make the game pretentious.

The sound effects really annoyed me after a while. When you have to do things outside of the spaceship with a limited amount of oxygen, Isaac will make sounds like he is dying once you get to having around thirty percent of oxygen remaining. This means that Isaac’s suit upgrades in terms of air supply must only increase his ability to hold his breath!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

Right, on to the real reason I played the game; achievements. The game consists of 12 chapters and awards one for each chapter. There is a thirteenth for completing the game and an additional four for the boss fights. This means there are seventeen unmissable ones for completing the game.

There are seven missable achievements, all of which are pretty straightforward. Two of these are relatively difficult and involve you having to complete a certain section of the game without taking excessive damage. These achievements are also secret which is an absolute fucker (the golden rule is that secret achievements should be potential storyline spoilers only.) Another one of these is also for completing the game using only the plasma cutter, the default weapon, which incidentally turns out to be the best gun in the game by a long way anyway.

There are 22 fucking around achievements for collecting logs, dismembering enemies, killing enemies in certain ways (more secret achievements here) and getting kills with certain weapons. Now, you would think that all weapons you had to acquire from the shop would be better than the default weapon? No way. The flamethrower is the pick of the bunch for shittiness here. It simply cannot kill anything quickly and amassing the thirty kills required for the achievement was a pain in the ass.

You can do a second playthrough and keep all your crap once you’ve completed it so it didn’t bother me too much that you had one achievement for completing the game with one gun and another six for getting specific weapon kills. However, there are two achievements which caused me to get really fucked off.

Cunt achievement number 1: Maxed Out. This achievement is for upgrading all of your shitty weapons, suit kinesis and stasis units. There are not enough credits in one playthrough to do this and even if you roll over your save, I still didn’t manage this until chapter 11 on a second playthrough. For the record, I hate having to play through a game more than once which brings me nicely on to...

Cunt achievement number 2:  Epic Tier 3 Engineer. This is an achievement for completing the game on impossible difficulty. Why don’t I like this achievement? Well, you cannot play on impossible until you’ve already completed the game. So to legitimately get all the achievements you have to play through the game three fucking times with no extras or changes.

Downloadable Content – N/A

To sum it up, it is a real slog to get all the achievements for one real reason. The game is really dull. The characters are not interesting and it’s hard to relate to a mute main character. I didn’t mention this earlier but Isaac’s girlfriend/wife was supposedly on the stranded space craft and there is meant to be an emotive reason for him being there but this never really materialises due to his mute nature.

You have to play through the game three times in order to get all the achievements and I don’t resent this with a game like Condemned or Mass Effect, as they actually have moral choices built in so the storyline or character traits are different based on your decisions. Dead Space is the same every time so this is a fail in my book.

I don’t really get why it got so highly rated. As a survival horror game, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be action adventure while having horror elements and it fails to deliver in both departments.