Brian kicks off his latest let’s play series with the sequel to the classic Dead Space!
After surviving the horrific events of Dead Space, Isaac Clarke wakes up on the space station Titan to find that the Necromorph infection has followed him there.
NOTE: The first couple episodes the chat volume is a bit low, but by episode three it’s fixed.
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About Dead Space 2:
Dead Space 2 is a science fiction survival horror video game developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, released in January 2011. Set three years after the events of the first Dead Space, the game follows protagonist Isaac Clarke’s fight against a new Necromorph outbreak on the Sprawl, a space station surrounding a shard of Saturn’s largest moon.
It’s October, and that means it’s time for horror! We’re holding our own OcTerrorFest, and as part of that, Brian is playing through the original Dead Space. In this episode, Isaac and his crew are already stranded on the USG Ishimura, and Isaac is trying to get the fuel tanks back online so they can get the ship moving again. But the necromorphs have other ideas.
The trailer for the next Call of Duty game (Advanced Warfare) was released on May 2nd, and I found it very interesting for a number of reasons. Of course, the fact that Kevin Spacey seems to be a prominent character, as well as the fact that it appears to be a more futuristic game are the biggest takeaways from the trailer. But, it was some of the design choices and mechanics that got me thinking about the potential of this new CoD entry.
In one scene for example, a character puts on a pair of gloves that let him scamper up walls. Maybe it’s just because I’m playing Amazing Spider-Man 2 right now, but I immediately thought about the fact that the Spidey games are also under Activision’s umbrella. Could the wall-crawling tech in the new CoD be pulling from what Beenox has refined over the past several years? I hope so.
Activision also owns High Moon Studios, the developer of the Transformers games. So when I saw the mech/battle armor portion of the new CoD trailer, I was thinking about that connection as well. I mean, this dude looks just like Megatron, doesn’t he?
And those hover bikes could function like the Cybertronian Decepticons, couldn’t they? Not to mention, it’s rumored that High Moon Studios is actually working on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Advanced Warfare. Maybe they’re doing more than just porting to last-gen.
I know this is probably wishful thinking, but Activision has all of these studios and a library of action games to pull from when they set out to create each new iteration of Call of Duty. I’d like to see them leverage some of those resources more, and maybe we’ll see some of that in Advanced Warfare. And yes, I know there are different gameplay engines at work here, but even from a design standpoint, it would be cool if some of those other studios are consulting with Sledgehammer.
Finally, let’s not forget that Sledgehammer is a studio formed by two of the creators of Dead Space. I found the story in the initial trailer to be very interesting, and I am a huge fan of the original Dead Space. I’m hoping some of that DNA makes its way into the Call of Duty franchise. Those exosuits did look a little Dead Space-y (no pun intended), didn’t they?
You know, the guy who’s all like “They changed my beloved franchise into something I don’t recognize anymore just to sell more copies to the mainstream!” That guy.
But, as much as I hate to say it, they changed my beloved franchise into something I don’t recognize anymore just to sell more copies to the mainstream.
And by my beloved franchise, I mean the Dead Space franchise. Because Dead Space 3, to me, is a stark contrast to the survival horror game that was the original, and it took the worst parts of Dead Space 2 and used them as building blocks for the third game.
I tell you all that because I really do love the Dead Space world. And both the world, and the games themselves, are firmly rooted in horror. The first game was a genuinely scary survival horror game that helped keep a failing genre afloat for a few years until other games started picking up the slack. Dead SpaceExtraction featured simplified mechanics but retained the great story and tension of the first game. Dead Space 2 was the equivalent of Aliens to the first game’s Alien, taking the action up a notch but keeping the scares and expanding the world at the same time. There were some questionable design decisions in Dead Space 2, but the whole of the game overshadowed any of the stumbles.
With Dead Space 3, the pendulum has swung completely to the action side, at the expense of both the storytelling and the horror of the first two games. The two places where this is most evident is in the pacing and in the way combat is approached.
What made the first two games so scary was the methodical pace they had. You would frequently find yourself introduced to an area and then be forced to explore it before any real combat began. Tension would continue to build, as there could be several minutes where you did not see an enemy, or perhaps just caught a glimpse on one off in the distance. When combat did occur, it was less about dealing with hordes of enemies and more about using your skills to take on small numbers of dangerous enemies at a time.
Dead Space 3 still uses pretty much the same mechanics as the first two games, but they don’t hold up as well because the nature of combat has changed significantly. Most encounters are with multiple enemies of different kinds, so I constantly have to use my stasis (slow things down) and kinesis (throw things around) abilities in conjunction with my weapons. And this is where things break down. Isaac moves pretty slowly, and aiming is imprecise. Which often means that I’m either wasting precious stasis blasts by missing enemies completely, or I’m waiting until they get in close enough to guarantee a hit, which defeats the purpose. So, combat often devolves into me firing wildly at the three enemies that are now on top of me, and trying to stasis them long enough to stomp them to death. Elegant it is not.
And that for me is the most glaring inconsistency in the design of Dead Space 3. The world itself, the atmosphere of the game and the mechanical systems seem designed for a methodical survival horror game, but the combat feels designed for a much faster action shooter. The result is a game where I actually dread combat, and as soon as I run into a frustrating encounter, I end my play session.
I could not stop playing Dead Space 1, 2 and Extraction. I have to force myself to spend time with Dead Space 3. That’s a real bummer. In many ways, I just wish someone would novelize the events of Dead Space 3 so that I could keep up with the story, but not have to play the game.
