Dead Space 2: Responce to OXM March Issue.

Hello there friends,

I finished reading an article in Official XBox Magazine, one that goes over Dead Space 2, the sequel to one of the better games released in current memory. I enjoyed this futuristic fun-house, and it was very much a carnival ride where your nerves where well fraid by the first 20 minutes. Not to say the game was perfect, but to say it was picking up the slack in the Survival Horror genre since Resident Evil decided to pack up its bags and move to pure Action.

Here are a few things that made Dead Space such a treat: First off, the protagonist Isaac Clark is NOT a guy in power armour wielding some absurd caliber weapon. He's a guy in what seems to be a welding suit designed for space. His weapon? A plasma cutter, a weapon he finds in a shop bench, used for cutting materials to length before it found a home in severing necromorph limbs. Many of the weapons in Dead Space seemed to be more designed for stripping resources than actually being tools of war, and that was half the fun.Now we have Dead Space 2 coming out.

And I can’t help but see bad decision after bad decision.

First off, let me re-state that Dead Space picked up where Resident Evil left off, and where it left off was for more action oriented grounds. Dead Space on the other hand made those moments between encounters sometimes more nerve wracking than some of the actual combats. The fear came from the belief that you were truly in danger, where paranoia was key to survival in a few instances, and you rarely had any moments of true empowerment because you where constantly aware you where the smallest fish in the pond.

So why do we need Isaac Clark back? As a character, he was a blank slate. So blank in fact, that the emotional twist at the end of Dead Space fell very mute. As a face (Which you only see at the start and end of the game) is probably more generic than 90% of generic faces in games today, to the point of making Gordon Freeman, Marcus Fenix, and Nathan Drake look distinguished.As far as his suit goes, this new look seems to be too sleek for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, grim and gritty is so over-played it's become kind of sad now, but with Isaac being a freaking engineer, where you expected him being more grease-jockey than combat nut, it makes sense.

Oh right;

"Three years of soul-searching have given him an attitude (not to mention a voice) and a thirst for taking down necromorphs."- OXM

So now he's 'ready' for the marker-breed threats. That's great, because everyone who's played this game was begging for a guy like Marcus to come in with a chainsaw bayonet. Though a small complaint about the article is they used Gears of War as an example of what is happening in Dead Space 2, including a bit where you have to go inside a necromorph to kill it, and how the aiming system is center-focused much like 90% of the shooters this day and age.

Let me explain something about the original Dead Space's aiming mechanic. When you decide to aim down sight, not only is your vision focused further forward, removing your peripheral vision, but aiming had you moving your laser-guide around the center portion of the screen without moving the camera that much unless you went to 3/4 screen where it would begin to turn. This reduction in vision and turn creates part of that 'fear of the unknown'. When your combat needs to have an element of suspense, this is one good way to do it, forcing the player to stop aiming down sight for a bit to check his peripheral screen. Yes, it's limiting, but that's part of the point. Isaac wasn’t an action hero; he's a guy with a futuristic pair of bolt cutters.

So, one of the new weapons is by now a standard in shooters, a crossbow-like weapon that pins enemies to the wall. I am going to ask someone where they thought this would be a good idea, though I see some applications, after experiencing the ripper (Deforester), force gun (Controlled explosive pressure without explosives), plasma cutter (Bolt Cutter), line gun (Rock/Ice Channeling and Removal), etc. does anyone see a practical use for this weapon?

Look, we get that Isaac has more experience with the necromorph nightmare than anyone should, but does that now mean we have to make him just another space-fareing generic badass? Visceral Games had something special with this series, that took the audience that had been left out in the cold with bad horror-style games (Does anyone REALLY want to say Silent Hill Homecoming was the defining game of the genera this console generation?)

Truth is, we have a wealth of psychological scars to enrich the character due to the first game; they are offering to give the character a voice and in doing so offering us another way to define the character further, and have a chance to continue the rich universe around Dead Space.

Oh, anyone else think that the idea of Multiplayer is just a bad idea? Bioshock 2 has already taught us that you lose out dividing your resources (Particularly time, talent, and money) trying to wedge in a multiplayer component into a game who's primary experience is single-player and focusing on doing it well. There are many games who are designed around a multiplayer component and do it well, but you have to recognize that those are often built with a focus on it and the single player tends to be the lacking experience (Modern Warfare 2 anyone?)

I guess I should express some excitement however, they found more ways to apply the oxygen timer, air-locks and shutters/vents, and so the environments are more useful as a weapon. If they do this well, I am hoping they cut down the ammo count to keep the player slightly ammo starved, if only to enforce creative on-the-spot solutions to dealing with necromorphs. A lot of potential to work with using the environments in a pressurized environment.

My biggest fear with Dead Space 2 summed up is that it's not playing to its strengths, and it feels like they are trying to do what everyone else does. In doing so, I am worried they will lose out in complete mediocrity as they did with Dante's Inferno, where any semblance of originality seemed more like a cheap trick equivalent of No Russian than it was of the quality found in Dead Space. But hey, they already got my money because I was such a fan of the first, so here's I am hoping I am Dead Wrong.

Until next time,

- Derek Leduc