EA's survival horror 'Dead Space' is hauntingly real
If the horror movie marathons and haunted houses of Halloween somehow left you disappointed, it's not too late to thoroughly freak yourself out. Just pick up a copy of "Dead Space," turn out all the lights and prepare to be scared.
Set aboard an immense mining ship that loses communication with Earth, you play an engineer sent to help get it back online. Unfortunately, it's suffering from way more than technical failure, with most of the crew having been killed and then reanimated as horrifying necromorphs, zombielike creatures that now wander around trying to eat you and your team as your character runs around getting systems back online.
While the game is branded as survival horror, there's way more action to go with the suspense than you might expect for the genre. While you do start out without weapons, fleeing from pursuing monsters, you quickly start picking up some heavy artillery to tear them apart. The game also offers a few points of relief from the stresses of survival. When you're upgrading your equipment, you'll never be attacked. And there's a nice blue line you can turn on and off that shows you where you need to go to fulfill your next objective, keeping you from getting lost in the labyrinthine ship.
However, ammo and health aren't always plentiful commodities. You'll find clips and med packs lying around, but never in the numbers you might like, requiring you to quickly learn how to manage resources and aim your shots. The aiming is especially essential as hitting a necromorph in the body does approximately nothing, and the only way you can get one to stop moving is by shooting off its limbs. Crippling just changes their strategy, with legless creatures crawling toward you and even headless ones happy to grab and rend you. Often the only way to tell you've successfully killed something is to look out for dropped loot.
The monsters you face are cunning and horrific. As you backtrack through a zone, an immobile creature might be something you killed before or it could be something just playing dead waiting to ambush you. Wounded creatures will retreat and attack you later, and it's not uncommon to see something scuttle off as you approach, leaving players with the quiet dread of knowing something is going to jump them at any second. As a result, jumping off the couch in shock is pretty common. Other monsters will reanimate the bodies of the recently dead, turning the terrain against you and leaving you to find new ways to even the score.
The game is wonderfully detailed. As you explore you'll find unnerving scrawling from the former crew members, including messages to loved ones and more practical warnings like "watch the vents" (heed this advice!).
One great feature is that the animation for cut scenes is actually the same as regular play, so you can flow seamlessly from a fight, to being pulled around helplessly by a giant tentacle to being back in control suddenly and needing to shoot the beast to save your life.
The game plays out a lot like being in an action horror movie, which has both its good and bad points. It is very well scripted, with little pieces of the plot being slowly revealed through audio and visual logs as you go through. It plays with you in the same way of the best suspense films, with that moment when you sigh with relief after having achieved something good often turning into a moment of horror. But at the same time, you're almost helplessly bound to that script. Even if you know monsters will jump out as soon as you activate something, you can't find them until they're ready. You might want to destroy a horrific alien nest the first time you see it, but you'll just have to wait until the plot says it's time for the spawn to attack you.
"Dead Space" also makes the most of it outer space setting, which is kind of scary even when there aren't zombies running around. While most of the time is spent on the ship, sometimes you have to race around jumping from surface to surface in zero gravity while your air supply ticks down. In these sections the only sound is that of your character's breathing - which gets shallower as the air supply dwindles - and his accelerating heartbeat. When (not if, of course) you get attacked out in space, you won't have any sound to clue you in something is coming.
In space no one can hear you scream, but when you're playing "Dead Space" it's sometimes hard not to anyway.
"Dead Space"
Rating: 3½ stars
Genre: Sci-fi survival horror
Platform: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC