Review: Dead Space 2

The Big takeaway: More Dead Space for those itching for a little horror house scares, and dismemberment gameplay.

The Little takeaway: A fierce rental at best. The 9 hour campaign is great, but the multiplayer lacks the depth to keep you coming back. The team based multiplayer obviously isn’t very fun if you don’t work together.

Review:
It’s been three years since Isaac Clarke had a wild ride on the crazy express, also known as the USG Ishimura from the first Dead Space. What with the dead girlfriend talking to him, he also had to disassemble a large portion of the crew that had been turned in to the hideous creatures known as the necromorphs. He dealt with abysmal asteroid shooting for a few minutes here and there, then blew up the marker what was causing all the problems to begin with.

In those three years after, Isaac Clarke has been absent-mindedly building another marker on a space colony called The Sprawl nestled away on the Saturn moon Titan. The game begins and he’s all straight jacketed up and living in crazy town from the looks of things. Dead Space 2 starts off with a bang, like any good haunted house. You won’t pick up any weapons for a good twenty minutes, and are dispatched right smack dab in a necromorph outbreak. It’s eye-grabbing, controller clenching good times from the word go, which is great, but that rush wears off pretty quickly as we settle in to the meat of the game.

Controls haven’t changed much since the first game, but the speed has. Isaac moves a lot faster than he did the last time around, it has to be all the space fiber he‘s been eating. It may be a compensation move for the multiplayer, but it’s really nice to be able to run away from the bad guys or through some of the larger areas in the Sprawl. This especially rings true in the final chapters of the game, where there’s just not enough time to stand back and lay waste to all your opponents. The zero gravity segments also get the speed treatment, adding rocket thrusters to Isaac’s suit. While they’re not as plentiful as the first game’s zero-g sections, they still are a lot of fun and gorgeous to boot!

Graphically, what this game does with lighting is phenomenal. Let’s face it, developers are squeezing every bit of horsepower out of these consoles, and it shows here. When the game opens up and shows off some outer space Saturn, or when you are around a furnace flame that bounces shadows around, putting you on edge as you rumble around the Sprawl, it looks great. The facial animations leave a lot to be desired, and come across as stiff. I would go so far as to say cartoonish at certain junctions, but it’s still fairly solid and doesn’t detract from the overall graphical package. There’s very few human characters to interact with, and for getting the point across, they’re fine.

The “puzzles” in this iteration leave a lot to be desired. I haven’t played the first Dead Space in a long while, but I could’ve swore they were better than this. Most of the “puzzles” are a “this thing is broken/missing, you need to find that corresponding piece then flip x switch to move forward”. Then you do that, monsters pop out, then you move forward. It’s pretty much: Explore, Shoot Monsters, Flip Switch, Puzzle (Enemy Pops Out), Restock items, Repeat. There is also a severe lack of set piece boss battles in this game. The game feints at the start to some epic boss encounters, then they dry up, and you're left just fighing stronger versions of the usual brand of necromorph. Compared to the first game, this is a bit of a let down and could've went further to spice up the pacing of the game, a la the first Dead Space.

Since the game is so short, there’s never really a feeling of redundancy. It took me about 9 hours, and I was honestly taking my time, reading/listening to everything, exploring, on and on. I guess the idea is that the multiplayer will pick up the slack.

Fortunately, the multiplayer works very well and isn’t a tacked on operation. It’s essentially team, objective based gameplay. One side is human doing objectives, the other side is necromorphs trying to stop them. There is no difference in the humans aside from color of suit. The necromorphs come in a variety of flavors, you have various necromorph types like the puker, the spitter, and two others I didn't really mess with. The game has your now standard leveling up system where you unlock new powers, guns or suits. The only real problem with the multiplayer is a lack of explaining clearly what each necromorph can do. The load screen in between matches enlightens from time to time, but you pretty much have to intuit what you can do. This also rings true for some of the objectives,. Sometimes it’s not very clear about where to go, who has what item to do what thing, what to defend, etc. Aside from that, if you do not act as a team in multiplayer, the experience isn’t very good. It took a group of us several matches to finally start communicating, once we did, the game played a lot better. I know that this may seem like a common sense thing, but we had a lot of people just playing it deathmatch style, and we soon found ourselves on the losing end. Also, the level design on the maps can be a bit labyrinthine in structure. The necromorphs can see through walls, and there’s this red filter on the screen, making the shadows much darker, and hard to see if you’re actually moving closer to the other team, or just running into a corner.

Instead of a multiplayer component for the next game, Visceral/EA should focus on co-op campaign, that’s the biggest takeaway from the multiplayer. When you work together, guarding flanks, providing cover fire while you finish objectives, the game is intense and satisfying. It mirrors the intensity and pace of the single player campaign, which is why you bought the game to begin with. You could add twists to the mechanics, provide more complex boss battles. Split the team up from time to time, you get the idea. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the multiplayer, there’s just not enough to it to justify why the focus was put in to that and not a co-op campaign which would make more sense from both story and game play perspectives. If the games genetic siblings Resident Evil 5 and the Gears of War series can provide that, why not try to add that Dead Space formula to a co-op campaign as well.

Paying sixty dollars for a fierce rental is a sticking point. The idea that a nine hour campaign is justifiable with the addition of a multiplayer component doesn’t work with all games. Seeing as the first Dead Space was a single player only kind of experience, that is the main draw for the sequel. The multiplayer is a nice cherry on top, but it is merely a dalliance, and then to be forgotten. On top of the multimedia campaign that comes with the Dead Space franchise, the comic books, novels, tie-in games/anime, the whole fandom of the series begins to take its toll financially, and it’s hard to justify a purchase that fills in a scant few holes.

Verdict: Fierce Rental.
--Or helpful trade in value after you exhaust the shallow multiplayer (if you’re a fan of the series and purchase it).