Gizmogs

Score: 95% Zero-G Splatter-Tastic

The new creative and creepy horror science fiction action thiller Dead Space might just be the game that you want to curl up with on a long cold October evening. The giant mining space ship the USG Ishimura is a pretty creepy haunted house that is full of all sort of freaky things that go bump in the dark.

Dead Space is an over the shoulder action game that is an tasty mix of Sci-fi and horror with a lot of polish. You can tell that this game was a labor of love for a very long time to the developers at EA. Electronic Arts really surprised a lot of people with this game. It is one of the freshest, creative most refreshing new games to come out of there in a very long time. It was from the same studio as of The Godfather and The Simpsons Game and the risks that they took with this game paid off nicely. EA really surprised people and surpassed expectations with this game. Wow an innovative game from EA that does not take place in WW2 and has nothing to do with professional sports!

You play the part of a salvage engineer that is part of a small repair crew send to check out and fix the communications array on the giant space ship the USS Ishimura. The Ishimura is a gigantic intergalactic strip mining ship that will blow a giant hole in a planet and then cart off the valuable minerals. The colony on the planet has been drilling the planet for years and rigging key points on the planet getting ready for the moment that the Ishimura rips into the planet. However in the process the colony miners found a giant alien obelisk called a "Marker". It ends up in this story there is a major religion called Unitology. This religion follows the teachings of a prophet and believe the prophet to be martyred. Non-Unitology think that they are a crazy cult that worships aliens conspiracies. However it is evolves into a major powerful religion. Around the time that the planet is ripped apart people start to go nuts and get a little homicidal and mass-suicidal. Then things go pretty bad when the bodies start to comeback from the dead and mutate into these shape shifting viral space zombies called "Necromorphs". The silent dude in the protective suit you play is pretty skilled at fixing things and that is a good skill to have since the crew of the Ishimura barricaded and trashed the ship when the space zombie plague spread to their ship when the captain took the holy alien "Marker" up from the planet. You don't play a military commando but you know how to wield the helpful bounty of industrial cutting and mining equipment. Having the Ishimura chock full of mining equipment is very convenient when you need to kill an army of space zombies. Despite its' fantastic setting Dead Space manages to carry the story off without becoming cheesy or unbelievable.

The time and money that EA spend working on the back story and dialog really helps weave a creepy plot-line that you uncover from entry logs left from the dead crew members of the Ishimura. I really recommend checking out the free animated comic they released on Xbox Live that follows the story of how bad things went on the planetary mining colony.

Dead Space sports one of the best story lines and voice acting I've seen in a long time and the audio design puts most horror movies to shame. The game is hands down scary and genuinely creepy. It has a freaking fascinating art style with incredible lighting and an industrial design that makes the Ishimura a messed up place to play through with the lights out, speakers up and alone in the dark. One of the cooler features of this game is that the displays are integrated into the suit so you can bring up menus and tell your ammo level and health status by looking at the holograms on and around the suit. This keeps you in the action while the space zombies are jumping out at you. Another nice thing is that there is a little holographic auto map hints by clicking the right stick. I almost never checked the map.

The key concept of this game is "strategic dismemberment". You can't just kill the monsters by simply shooting them in one place, you have to cut them up piece by piece. They react to where they are damaged and are still quite dangerous. If you blow off it's legs and it will crawl at you. Blow off it's head and it will run around wildly until you take it down for good.

Now you can slow down the baddies by throwing a blast of time stasis at them. You also can use a levitation device that you use together with stasis to solve engineering puzzles to repair stuff and move through the quite screwed up giant space ship.

The physics of the game is pretty darn impressive with the best representation of a zero gravity environment that we have ever seen in video games. Things float around realistically and there are parts where you have to jump wall to wall with magnetic boots. I am also surprised at how little of an air tank your protective suit has. I mean I understand that they want to run fast to get your next hit of air when in a vacuum but this dude is supposed to go into wrecked ships then they should have given him a suit that could stand more than a couple minutes without air.

The implementation of hand-to hand-combat could be more diverse. You only have one punch and stomp animation sequences and I understand that this guy is not a combat expert but it could have a little more moves.

This is one of the only games to actually have it's release schedule pushed up and released early and was actually completely done. On the Joystiq podcast they quipped that the video game industry does not even have a common term for that. They suggested "expedited".

I don't really play horror games because I normally think they are cheesy but I was completely into Dead Space. This is a great scary as hell game that is just in time for Halloween. There have been movies that have successfully mixed the sci-fi and horror before but not a lot of games that have really gotten the mix right. If Dead Space was a drink it would be one nicely mixed spicy Bloody Mary cocktail with extra thick blood with a lime and horseradish.