Celebrate Halloween In Style – Scare the crap out of yourself with Dead Space

October 31, 2008 by Ben

Dead space is the latest terrifying release into the survival horror genre. Seemingly drawing inspiration from the original Alien movie, Dead Space puts you in the unfortunate shoes of a space engineer named Isaac Clarke. You are part of a team of three sent to investigate a distress signal, which as we all know is never a good start!

The source of the distress signal is a mile long mining ship, the USG Ishimura, which has been infested by aliens. You are soon separated from the rest of your team and must utilise your space engineer type tools in order to defend yourself from the onslaught of Xenomorphs trying to eat your brain. This leads to some very interesting, never seen before combat as most situations aren’t as cut and dry as your typical shooter. For example a quick headshot which would normally be sufficient won’t help you at all in Dead Space. Instead you need to systematically severe the limbs of your assailants to ensure they don’t keep coming at you. This is an unusual twist to the typical headshot routine and will force most gamers to rethink their strategy.

For the most part the fighting is extremely frantic and directly in your face due to the overly resilient and aggressive nature of your enemies. Luckily for you, in addition to your array of mining tools and flamethrowers your character has a few special abilities to keep the bad guys at bay. Stasis allows you to temporarily slow and stop time giving you precious extra seconds to dismember those nasty aliens. Telekinesis lets you move objects around and is useful for both puzzle solving and combat.

Dead space is incredibly atmospheric. The sound effects help to keep gameplay scarily intense, especially in the moments between battles when you aren’t sure if you’re safe or if the aliens are just lurking in the shadows waiting to attack. From distant screams of tortured survivors to the fast paced breathing of your character which scarily muffles out all other sounds when you enter a vacuum – the sound design really steps up the fear factor to a whole other level.

Graphically, Dead Space is excellent. The level design throughout keeps the player captivated and certain scenarios become very memorable. Travelling from one area of the ship to another you notice the brilliant levels of detail that have been applied to the game. Think Bioshock level design, this really helps distinguish one area of the ship to the next enabling the player to appreciate the awesome size of the mining ship.

In summary the amazing graphics and sound production make Dead Space a brilliant single player story experience. This game is sure to raise your heart rate this Halloween and offers an amazing single player experience if you are brave enough to stomach it! The only think lacking from this game in my opinion is some element of multiplayer or co-operative play.

Overall an excellent addition to the survival horror genre and to the collection of only the bravest gamers.