I got a lot of flack a couple weeks ago when I called Dead Space a failure as survival horror, and I feel like this statement was misconstrued as me saying that I didn't like the game. This is far from true. As a shooter, Dead Space was really top notch, with the focus on dismembering enemies rather than the usual head shots bringing a fresh element to an over-saturated market. It simply stopped being scary after the first hour once Isaac Clarke: the engineer became Isaac Clarke: buzzsaw wielding death machine. None of the characters were likable, and the fact that Isaac was a mute who seemed to be blindly following orders from the people hiding conveniently wherever the monsters weren't jerked me right out of the plot. Why in god's name was Isaac the only one doing the heavy lifting? Isn't he even a little exasperated? Why the hell is this asshole not saying a single word? This was why the attempts to make us care about his lost wife or even him as a character went straight past me because in spite of the fun I was having chopping things up, I didn't understand why Isaac was doing anything he was doing. Well Visceral Entertainment heard all of these complaints, and brought unto us Dead Space 2.
They brought it unto us atop a cavalry of only the most
ferocious Russian grizzly bears.
The game opens with a cut scene of Isaac in what seems to be a mental institution on The Sprawl, a large city complex built on a shard of Titan, Saturn's moon. He is interviewed by a man about the incident aboard the Ishimura and the marker from Aegis 7 that turned the crew into necromorphs. He is unable to remember, and taunted by twisted visions of his wife, Nicole (from the first game), who we learn went to work aboard the Ishimura at Isaac's prompting. He blacks out and awakens an indeterminate amount of time later to find that necromorphs have overrun The Sprawl. An orderly tries to free him, but doesn't have time to remove the straight-jacket before he is killed. You assume control at this point and spend about the first 15 minutes of the game helplessly bound by your straight-jacket, which is a very intense experience. The game leads you through a tutorial of sorts, granting you abilities from objects in the environment, and you'll quickly find that this game plays pretty much identically to Dead Space from a purely logistical perspective. Menus are accessed in real time via your RIG, upgrades are performed with power nodes you find around the environment, and all the weapons you remember from the original are back for round 2, along with the object slowing stasis power and kinesis.
Let's see you eat my brains at 1/4 speed, bitch!
So what I'm driving at here is that if you enjoyed the mechanics of Dead Space, they're all here again. The zero gravity controls have even been expanded to allow free flying, which controls quite nicely and is saved by the ability to orient to the ground with the push of a button. What really shines in this title is its superior pacing. Isaac is almost never out of your control, even in cut-scene like sequences. This does mean that there are a certain amount of quick time events, but more often than not, you still have to shoot and defend yourself rather than simply pressing X to not die over and over. The game also balances the frantic action sequences (of which there are many) with a decent number of more isolated areas, the best of which is probably The Sprawl's nursery, where there is surprisingly little action, simply detailed environments that paint a vivid and ugly picture of what befell the city's infants. Due to his amnesia, Isaac does still spend a fair amount of time taking orders from assholes, but these are much more interestingly characterized assholes than the game's predecessor. And even though he sounds a little Nolan North-ish, the fact that Isaac actually speaks and reacts to things kept my head in the plot the whole time.
Dead Space 2 also features some online multiplayer, which also works quite well. One team is humans, trying to secure a number of checkpoints or gather resources depending on the map, and the other team is the necromorphs, whose goal is significantly less complicated. There do seem to be some balance issues, as the game features a Call of Duty style leveling system for human equipment and necromorph abilities (ie. you earn them by winning matches or doing things like completing objectives or killing opponents). Matchmaking is a little wonky sometimes and I have wound up in games where the other team had a few members who absolutely destroyed us due to their superior abilities that some of us were still quite a ways away from unlocking. Still, it's fun for what it is, and I'm sure the balance issues will resolve themselves over time.
You even get the ability to give the human players a
not so friendly hug.
So yes, Dead Space 2 was entirely worth the wait. On normal difficulty, survival is seldom a challenge until the end, but the experience is still an intense one, as the more varied enemy sets mean that your strategies need to be constantly shifting to adapt to each situation and environment. The fact that each cut scene is generally an interactive experience means that you are never really jerked out of the game, and in spite of the fact that this game didn't have me crapping myself like Amnesia, it still gets pretty spooky at times. I'll leave you with one word of advice: if you see a "dead" necromorph on the ground, it is never dead. Never.
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