Ok, for those of you who've played this game, I'm sure you were, like me, dazzled by the graphics and intrigued by the story. For a few hours anyway. Now, don't get me wrong, it looks really good, it plays well, but there are glaring problems that really don't need to be there, EA just got lazy. Firstly, I'd love it if there was a better reason to be wading through all that death and carnage. When you get right down to it, all you are doing is fighting your way through a gazillion blood thirsty mutant alien things to press button X to make whatever start or happen or fix itself. If it weren't for the aforementioned aliens, a monkey could do what you are doing. Also, the lead character never speaks. Like ever. This worked to brilliant effect in games like Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG (well....every Mario game really), but those games were years ago, it is 2008, and if you want me to care at all about the well being of Mr. Space Hero, giving him a voice or some sort of emotion would have been nice. As it is, you forge no connection to the guy, he might as well be a robot built for the purposes of killing on a massive scale. Also, to make a game that has a new game mechanic - that being the dismembering of enemies rather than simply shooting them - and to put such piddly amounts of ammo in it, to me is a contradiction. If you want me to shoot stuff, I need bullets. I spent most of my time running away from everything or using my kickass cutting guns as clubs. Which, by the way, seems a lot more inneffective than I thought it would, given the size and bulk of most of the guns in the game. In summary, Dead Space, to me, seems to be a game that designers spent months on making look good, and about an hour on the story, and then forgot about casting an actor to read the hero's lines and decided to scrap them. It comes off as impersonal, and any attempts at making anyone care about the events you are so desperately trying to stop should be rightly met with disinterest. So, if you like killing aliens by the boatload, but don't care why you are doing it, or ever want to hear the guy you're controlling utter a word, then this is the game for you. For the rest of you, stick to Silent Hill and Resident Evil until the rest of the world figures out how to make a decent survival horror game. Ok....Fatal Frame was good, but I had to wipe the poop out of my pants one too many times to love it.... 5.5/10 |
