Deadspace
In 1979 the movie Alien showed us one thing; Space is scary. 29 years later, Deadspace shows up to tell us that, well, no not really. Deadspace shows up promising to bring new life to the nonexistent survival horror genre. Fans like myself rejoiced at the prospect of a new exciting property to scare the hell out of us. Sadly when I thought I’d be playing the next big thing in the Horror game genre, I found myself playing a very repetitive and bland action title.
Deadspace puts you in the gravity boots of Isaac Clarke, an engineer on the USG Kellion. You along with the rest of the crew, which apparently consists of only two other people, are on a mission to respond to a distress call from the UGS Ishimura, a large mining vessel. It also appears that Isaac’s love Nichole is on the derelict ship, though no real back story to this, or any of the other characters is ever given. When you arrive on the Ishimua, it becomes very obvious very quickly that something horrible has happened. The crew and the ship have been infected and taken over by Necromorphs, and alien life form that kills you, then reanimates your dead corpse into horrific monstrosities. The plot slowly advances as you and the others begin to figure out the pieces to what happened. Missing parts of the story are told via logs that you collect, very similar to Bioshock. These logs come in audio, video, and text format, with the text being almost worthless as the letters are too small to read. Not that this really matters though, as the story is very bland and generic, taken from any Sci-fi alien infestation conspiracy movie.
Of course a mediocre story can be overlooked if the game excels in game play features. Sadly Deadspace didn’t really deliver here either. Deadspace is played in typical 3rd person view, only with the character all the way to the left of the screen. This becomes a problem in a lot of battle scenarios, as your health is displayed on Isaac’s back, and the camera tends to move so that your view of the health gage is blocked. Of course your health being displayed on the characters back does sever the purpose to eliminate the standard HUD, and the game does this very well, allowing for a deep level of realism and immersion.
Isaac has an arsenal of 6 different guns that can be unlocked and purchased throughout the game, which is really pointless as the first one you get is the best, and can carry you through to the end. Deadspace tries to set its self apart from other ‘shoot the monster in the head’ games by eliminating the head shot. The game does this by instead making it so that you have to dismember your enemies. See necromorphs are too tough to succumb to a regular old headshot. Only but slicing off all of their limbs can you inflict enough damage on them to kill them. It’s a cool new idea that quickly becomes as simple as shooting a zombie in the head. The game features about 5 different enemies, not counting bosses, all of which are killed in the exact same way. And all of which use the same attack strategies. It seems the developers forgo that enemy AI can handle more than just the ‘run at the player and try to kill them’ command. Every time you enter combat from the first to the last time you fight the same enemies who attack you the same way and are killed by the same process. Combat becomes very redundant and after a level or too seems more like a chore than a pulse pounding fight for your life. Another very annoying thing is the amazing spawn ability the necromorphs have. You can kill everything in front of you, turn around to walk away, and two more enemies will spawn right where you were just standing. I hoped that at this point in game design we were past the magically appearing monsters. Guess not. The creature design of the necromorphs also seems horrible uninspired. They look like nothing more than Doom rejects, and there is hardly any difference in design from one creature to another. In fact two of the 5 bosses are just big masses of tissue with tentacles sticking out. Should you be unlucky enough to die at the hands of these beasties, you will either just fall over dead, perhaps with your head loped off, or you will have to suffer through a painfully long and unnecessarily bloody death scene. Generally these involve you being impaled on one of the creature’s blade arms, as they slowly hack off your limbs one by one, eventually decapitating you and slicing you in half. These death sequences are not cool, like Leon being chain sawed in Resident Evil 4, but just over the top and seem like they’d be more at home in Hostile 3 or Saw 6. And die you probably will, as health and ammo are horribly scarce. The game makes up for this by allowing you to buy ammo, but stores are generally located at the very begging of the level where you have no need for them. And as you inventory is terribly small, even after you upgrade your suite, you don’t usually have enough room to hold ammo for more than one gun at a time anyway.
The game does feature more than bland combat and walking down dark hallways. There is the occasional puzzle to be found. These however are even more disappointing than the combat you had to endure to get to them. They seem to serve no purpose but to waste time. And seeing as the game can be completed in less than 10 hours, they don’t even do that well. Seriously, the puzzles in Deadspace are not fun, they are not difficult, and they don’t even make you scratch your head for a moment. Except to wonder why you had to do them in the first place.
The game consist of 12 levels, spaced apart by a boss battle every 2 levels. The bosses are just as easy to beat as the normal enemies in the game, and generally take much longer than they should. By the time I beat the sixth level, yes half way through the game, I was ready to be done. Deadspace is supposed to be a survival horror game, but does more with merging horror and action shooters than even Resident Evil 4 did. What I mean is there is very little horror or survival in this game. It is really just a straight 3rd person action shooter. The developers tried to add some cheap slasher movie scares, but none of them pay off and you see them coming a mile away.
Deadspace also features many moments when you must entire either the vacuum of space, or a zero gravity room. The space vacuum moments are pretty cool, but the zero gravity rooms tend to be annoying. Camera angles get very confusing and finding your next objective is more of a pain than ever before. To ease that suffer though, Isaac has one more trick up his sleeve. By clicking in the right stick a blue light will project along the floor briefly in the direction you need to go. This is a great addition, as the in game map is totally useless.
Deadspace is not exactly a bad game, despite all of the above griping about it. The game is absolutely beautiful to look at. There are some moments on the ship when you can see out into space that really are breath taking. Isaac does have some cool tools to use as well. Kinesis is really as it sounds. It gives you the ability of telekinesis in the form of a gun. This is used to solve puzzles, and can also be used in combat. The best example of this is once you slice an arm blade off of an enemy, using the kinesis gun to throw it at another incoming monster. Isaac’s other cool tool is his Stasis gun. This is used to slow objects down, or even to freeze enemies in their tracks. While these offer some slight variation to the standard combat, it’s really not enough to make it spectacular. Where Deadspace really takes succeeds is in player immersion. As mentioned above, there is no HUD; everything is presented in game as part of the world. Also, all of your menu actions take place in real time, so healing or switching a weapon must be done strategically in battle; otherwise you open yourself up for attack.
Over all I was disappointed by Deadspace, though I think this might be partly due to the expectations I had for the game. Of course it is also due to the fact that Deadspace offers no challenge, is incredibly repetitive and losses its charm very quickly. There is possibility to expand the Deadspace universe with a sequel or two, and should EA choose to do so, hopefully they will think about expanding the game play over all. In closing, Deadspace is not amazing, but it’d not a terrible experience either. But if you are looking for a next-gen survival horror game, skip this one, and go play Silent Hill Homecoming.
Michael Crichton RIP. Author dies Nov. 4th 2008
CNN just made a breaking news announcement, Michael Crichton has died suddenly after a private battle with cancer, according to a statement issued by his family. Crichton was the author of many best selling novels such as Jurassic Park, Timeline, The Great Train Robbery, and Sate of Fear. He was the executive producer of ER and was a Emmy and Peabody winner.
Personally he has been my favorite author since I read Jurassic Park for the first time in elementary school. I have read and re-read his works more than anything else that has ever found a place on my book shelf. At the end of every new novel, he left me on the edge of my seat waiting for the next. It seems now a sad reality that whatever was next, will never come. He wrote with an imagination and an intelligence that made everything we penned seem like reality, qualities that are not common among many authors these days. He was, and will continue to be a huge inspiration on me as a writer.
My thoughts go out to his family Friends and fans. He is missed.
Edit: IGN.com reports that his final work will be published December of this year.
Election Day 2008! The Final Stage Says VOTE!
We here at The Final Stage encourage you to go out and vote today. Make sure that you are a part of history. Don’t miss your chance to have your voice be heard.
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