Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher
Game: Dead Space 2
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 15 hrs
I had been warned that Dead Space 2 was scary from the very start, and sure enough the moment it loaded up the game confronted me with a rather terrifying end user license agreement from EA. The legalese was hard to interpret, but seemed to indicate that EA had the right to block the use of the disk I had just purchased at any time… making me wonder if we are really buying games these days or just temporarily leasing digital property. Are we seeing the first steps towards the erosion of individual ownership and the seizing of all material and ideological properties by corporations? Apparently you don’t need to look to a far-flung space opera for a nightmarish corporate state dystopia… it might be just a few years off. Necromorphs can be unsettling, but the eve after starting Dead Space 2 my nightmares were mostly about Electronic Arts.
Once past the license agreement and generous temporary granting of rights to play MY game, I settled back into the over-sized boots of stomp-happy protagonist Isaac Clarke. There are few characters in video games who take the same kind of relish in stamping down on their foes. Sure, Mario politely bounds atop the heads of mushrooms like a particularly balletic Mary Poppins. But with Isaac, each footfall is a resounding iron thud accompanied with an angry bellowing grunt, bones snapping as skittering monstrosities are ground mercilessly into dust by Isaac’s sharp metal treads. After surviving the first Dead Space, I guess it isn’t a wonder that Isaac would have a few anger issues that need resolution… who knew that pounding things underfoot could be so therapeutic?
Dead Space 2 catapults you straight into a full-blown marker-induced necromorph crisis. Isaac awakes on a space station that has been overrun. He sets out to find a cure for his growing dementia and to destroy a new marker constructed by Earthgov (the reasons behind building this thing are so nebulous that one log has a character complaining that it must have been an alien-induced collective psychosis… really, that’s a pretty catch-all excuse!) The opening sequence attempts to recapture the extremely harrowing first encounter with these beasties from the original game. At first it succeeds in being truly panic-inducing, but as the game continues there is a growing sense of a shift of genre akin to that made between Alien and Aliens. Sure, Dead Space 2 has copious buckets of blood and bodily fluid splattered over every inch of every room Isaac visits, and the game designers took great relish in animating gory death sequences for Isaac in every imaginable circumstance. However, Dead Space 2 still comes across as more of an action title than straight horror.
Anyone who has played the original game knows what to expect in encounters with necromorphs, and dispatching them was often more a matter of strategy and conservation of ammo than desperate self-preservation. This is not to say that there aren’t scary moments as you play… but for me they more often involved little things like toilets unexpectedly flushing by themselves or a wall-mounted television suddenly blaring static rather than encounters with the actual monsters. It is telling that the creepiest sequence in the game involves a return to the setting of the original Ishimura, recovered and patched with plastic sheets and duct tape.
There are a number of reasons that Dead Space 2 is less scary than its predecessor, including the decision to give Isaac a face and dialogue, the decision to treat Isaac’s mental issues as more of a set of discrete alien visitations rather than an ongoing dementia, the more real-life familiar settings (a futuristic mall or apartment complex just aren’t as scary as the incomprehensible innards of a spaceship engineering deck) and the inescapable familiarity with the premise. There are also some meta-game reasons for Isaac to sometimes feel safe… the fact that the player can’t do anything while Isaac crawls through ducts except move him forward guarantees that no attacks will happen in confined spaces. The game also makes a strange fetish of Isaac’s various suits of armor, strange in that the outfit, all uncomfortable burlap and sharp metal, originally served to increase the sense of creepiness and vulnerability rather than to lend a sense of power as it now does. Perhaps this was meant to catch the Halo crowd… they really like their helmets, I’m told.
Dead Space 2 proves, however, that a shift in genre like this is not necessarily a bad thing. Making the game less scary allows it to reach a broader audience… the first game suffered low sales in part because it was a little too harrowing for the general public. Unlikely to match the original in scares, the sequel instead focuses on its strong combat system and other game mechanics. Here we have an epic, edgy adventure through a disintegrating sci-fi setting, with some truly neat action sequences and a lot of very engaging impromptu alien autopsy.
Dead Space 2 expands nicely on the original game. It adds some neat new types of enemies, which when mixed with mobs of existing necro-types make for some harrowing and varied game play. I especially liked the exploding zombie babies (who doesn’t, really?), whose alien mewling represented one of the most unsettling sound bites... which is saying something because the sound effects are great throughout. The zero-gravity and space sequences are very well done, giving Isaac just the right amount of control vs. disorientation as he maneuvers around a three dimensional world (actually, I think that there was room for more of this.) Weighing in at two disks on the Xbox 360 version (one BluRay still suffices on the PS3) the game definitely gives the player their money’s worth of action… this is no anemic 3-hour campaign (Halo Reach, anyone?)
In fact, the visual style and immersive game play are so good, that the game leaves you pining for something more. Dead Space suffers from the Star Trek syndrome of presenting a world with high technology, but little of it has filtered down into daily life. With the level of detail present in every image and tableau, it was regrettable that the world was so often prosaic. Where are the inscrutable gadgets, strange cultural tidbits and history of life in space? Rather than the mostly uninformative logs scattered throughout the game (at this point scattered journal entries are a requirement in survival horror, but they’ve never been used as well as in the classic System Shock 2) how about showing us anti-grav children’s toys, a futuristic version of the internet, or even just some future snack foods. The technology used to make a game like Dead Space 2 could easily be used to show us marvels. A few more background ideas would have been much more welcome than the lengthy treatise on Unitology that we receive instead.
My one other minor complaint regards the telekinetic powers that Isaac is once again equipped with in this game. Feeling confident due to my vast experience in survival horror, I chose to play the game on “survivalist” difficulty, one step harder than “normal” (and two steps easier than the hardcore mode that only lets you save the game three times in your entire play through… I’ll leave that one to the insomniacs). Survivalist was a pleasing challenge, requiring very careful management of ammo and health packs. This meant, of course, that Isaac’s ability to pick up and fling sharp objects using TK became essential, especially as two well-placed broomsticks could make an end of most of the critters in the game. The downside of having this mechanic in a resource-conservation game, however, was that it quickly became a necessity for Isaac to do all of his walking around levitating objects in front of him in case of sudden assault. What initially seemed to be a very cool mechanic became something of a chore, as carrying a monster talon around for several minutes grew annoying, but was always strategically preferable to wasting extra ammo.
On a final note, Dead Space 2 also comes equipped with a multiplayer mode. While this reviewer considers himself a strict adherent to single-player, in the interest of giving a full review he ventured briefly into an online match. The one I played in had a team of four humans versus a team of four necromorphs in some kind of capture the flag competition. The necro side was interesting, allowing you to assume the form of more powerful monsters if you decide to wait longer between respawns. While it all seemed a bit silly to me (and the few people who spoke during the match were still singing high soprano) the game did seem to run well with no glitches or stutters, and plenty of unlockables to be had, so if this is your thing, enjoy. Personally, I prefer a lonely misanthropic Isaac stomping through dank corridors to chummy team combat, and it seems likely that most people would buy this game thinking the same way.
Addendum: All this snow got me in the mood to pick up Dan Simmons' novel "The Terror" about a 19th century Shakelton-esque Northwest passage expedition that goes terribly wrong and also runs into some kind of monster. The characters are dealing with minus 50 degree temperatures, which are so cold that they have to keep their teeth from chattering because there is a danger that their teeth could spontaneously explode. That has to be the nastiest thing I've heard about in some time... just say no to cold-induced tooth explosions.
