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The Game Box: 'Dead Space' Fills Video Game Void

By Robert Stoneback
Focus Editor

When I first started this column, my goal was to comment on the video game industry and analyze, as best I could, whatever news came up regarding my hobby of choice. Unfortunately, a busy weekend coupled with little happening in the video game world until next week’s Game Developer’s Conference has left me with very few ideas floating around in my brain.

Instead, I am going to regale you with tales of a game I played over spring break. Lucky you.

The game in question was Electronic Arts’s “Dead Space,” which I can just barely justify talking about as it fits into the same nebulous genre of “survival horror” that the recently released “Resident Evil 5” does as well.

“Dead Space” casts you as blue-collar spaceship engineer Issac Clarke on his worst day of work ever, as he traverses the derelict ship from B-list Sci-Fi movie “Event Horizon” as it is infested by the creepy-crawly Flood aliens from the “Halo” series. O.K., the setting is actually the Ishimura, a mining ship, and the monsters are actually “Necromorphs,” but it is pretty much just a shambling, zombie space rose by another name.

The point I am trying to make is that “Dead Space” is the video game equivalent of the Roman Empire; it does not have a lot of original ideas of its own, but it knows how to make the best out of them. Next to “Event Horizon,” the game borrows most of its atmosphere from 2K Boston’s “Bioshock.”

The blood-stained, maniac-filled ruins of “Bioshock’s” underwater city are replaced with the blood-stained, space zombie-filled ruins of the Ishimura, firearm dispensing vending machines intact. Another “homage” to “Bioshock” are the audio recordings found in every nook and cranny of the ship, recording the last thoughts of the crew before they were torn to bits.

While I understand this is ideal for not bringing the player out of the game with a non-interactive cutscene, I have a hard time believing that everybody on the crew would busy themselves recording their diaries while their ship was being taken over by face-eating monsters.

“Dead Space” also borrows heavily from the aforementioned “Resident Evil” series. The over-the-shoulder shooting is taken directly from “Resident Evil 4” (which itself returns in the fifth installment) and shots are more effective depending on where on the enemies’ bodies you hit them.

The important difference in “Dead Space,” though, is that you can actually move and shoot at the same time, making combat much less of a chore. I guess in the future mankind has evolved the ability to use their legs and trigger fingers at the same time. “Dead Space” also gives players the ability to sever the arms, legs and tentacles from the Necromorphs. Gruesome, yes, but also a strategic advantage in that it is much harder for an alien to play piñata with you if it is crawling around on the ground with no legs.

Issac also gets a telekinetic ability, allowing him to move around objects in the environment, since the developers thought the gravity gun was really cool in “Half-Life 2.” It does not hurt the game, but it never felt like it was used to its fullest extent, though it was fun to bonk space zombies in the head with empty boxes.

A much more useful addition to the combat is the stasis ability, which lets Issac temporarily freeze an enemy or moving object. This is especially useful since enemies have a tendency to swarm you in their eager attempt to make an all-you-can-eat buffet out of your face. It is also used in a couple puzzles within the game, such as slowing down one of the ship’s turbines so that you can repair it.

So, it is not the most creative game ever but, aside from an asinine “shoot the asteroids” segment, I was enjoying myself throughout.

The atmosphere was greatly helped by excellent graphics and sound, the combat was frantic and the weapons, ranging from a futuristic cutting tool to an industrial saw launcher, are more interesting than your usual pistol, machine gun, rocket launcher progression. The only thing that really felt out of place was that the game was not really scary, considering the concept.

Remember the part about the survival horror genre being nebulous? Most of the games I have played that have ostensibly been in that genre were hardly anything to get spooked over. The only game I have played that I would genuinely use the term for would be “Silent Hill 2,” where the biggest antagonist is not the monsters that roam the fog-covered streets of the titular town but the town itself.

Skewed camera angles, an extremely limited field of vision and a character whose best form of defense for a large part of the game was a board with a nail through it always made me think twice before stepping through the next door I came across.

That effect is lost when your character can freeze enemies in place, fling objects around the room with a flick of his hand and is armed to the teeth with lasers, flamethrowers and anti-gravity circular saws. It made “Dead Space” a lot more fun to play than older horror games, but I was never really nervous while playing.

Maybe I am just missing the point as to what a “survival horror” game is, but that is a topic best saved for a separate column.

“Dead Space” is a finely crafted game using some of the best elements of other titles on the market. It is sort of like a sundae – you have had the separate ingredients before, but they all go along great together.