Reviews// Dead Space

As you play Dead Space™ you are placed on tenterhooks, never quite knowing what will happen next, always suspecting that it will not be pleasant, always confident that it might be fatal. Not that fatality is that big an issue in the game, levels are not huge, and save points are frequent. But that didn't stop me creeping and crawling about (you cannot actually crawl, or jump) trying my best not to disturb a nest of alien scum.

As you progress through the game your objectives evolve. Certain doors are locked; you have to find the key; certain computers are unresponsive; you have to find a logic board; certain machines are inoperable; you have to find a widget or use a special power to make them faster or slower or more chocolatey flavoured. Essentially, these are puzzles, though they are the kind that force you to go to places where there is danger, rather than ones that make you wish you'd paid more attention in Mr. Bradbury's maths lessons (that was not actually a veiled reference to sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury, but a real reference to my high school maths teacher).

As you might expect, there are extra weapons you can collect or purchase along the way. In order to purchase them you need cash, this may be a collapsing alien-scum infested space station, but that's no reason for the wheels of galactic capitalism to grind to a halt. Conveniently, you find cash laying around the ship, presumably where it fell from the pockets of members of the crew when they were dismembered. Other places you might find money are: in lockers on the walls of the many rooms you visit, ones with blue lights open, ones with red ones don't; and on the corpses of the dead creatures you have killed. This latter is useful, and it does give you an incentive to kick alien butt rather than run away and hide like a biatch.

Once you have cash, you can purchase weapons or ammunition, or med packs that you use to replenish your energy (it's always good to have). The other upgrade route is to use a bench to apply nodes to your matrix in order to upgrade the capabilities of your weapons or suit. The matrix offers you several upgrade routes, each of which affects different aspects of your weapon (reload time, damage caused etc). You must choose how you place your energy nodes in the grid to best effect. Nodes, like other pick-ups, can be found around the ship or purchased at a store. You can only carry so many items, but you can trade ones you have for credits in order to free up slots in your inventory. These aspects add a very lightweight strategy aspect to the game, but nothing to get you too bogged down such as the inventory management you might see in a role-playing game.

None of the individual aspects of Dead Space™ are revolutionary, what's not stolen from Alien is stolen from Resident Evil. But the game is certainly more than the sum of its parts. If you've read my Motorstorm: Pacific Rift review, you'll know that while I think originality is laudable, it's by no means necessary. Taking a well-worn genre and breathing new life into it is equally laudable. There have certainly been more than a fair share of sci-fi video games, and there's no shortage of survival horror games too, but Dead Space™ brings something worthwhile to the genre by upping the ante, and making a game that is an almost perfect example of both genres. All of the boxes are ticked, and while there are few surprises in the features, there are plenty of them in the game-play.