dead space game review

To paraphrase Stephen King, if you find you cannot horrify, you go for the gross-out. EA’s third-person “survival horror” game Dead Space (for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3) frequently horrifies and grosses out. It’s also ironically produced — if we’re to believe Wikipedia and MobyGames – by a guy who paints ”fantastic sunsets, huge redwoods, snowy mountains and colorful seascapes.” Let’s just say there are no sunsets, redwoods, mountains, or seascapes in Dead Space, though there are buckets of blood, mangled body parts, mangled body parts protruding from bodies in ways you’ve perhaps never imagined, and imaginative ways to excise said parts from the skittering, screeching, spine-tingling trunks of creatures you wouldn’t want to meet in broad daylight, much less on a derelict space freighter.

Does it matter that you’re tethered to a story that trots out Gaming’s Top 100 Tropes like it’s teaching a freshmen level seminar? Not really. You’re here for one purpose: to walk into rooms, have something pop out and go boo, fumble to carve the freakishly nimble mess of flesh into giblets before it eats your face off, then do it again times 11 or 12 hours of Space Hulk meets John Carpenter’s The Thing. Did I say “carve”? Dead Space takes the counterintuitive and tactically intriguing tack that shooting off limbs instead of central body parts is how you kill enemies faster.Quick design-y sidenote: Throughout the game, Isaac Clarke doesn’t say a word, he just grunts and gasps apprehensively. We’re only afforded a glimpse of his face at the outset (and, I’m told, the ending). The trouble with this fairly common approach is that it makes you feel like a child at the outset. People wheel and deal around you, laugh or joke, talk to or tease you, but all you can do is sit or stand in mute repose. As soon as you’ve boarded the space freighter, you pop on a full-masked helmet, completing the psychological distancing trick that’s typically employed to imply that you’re the hero, not the third-person avatar you’re starting at on screen. Maybe it’s that you can see Isaac’s avatar as you play here (instead of just a pair of hands, or “floating gun”). Granted it’s a subtle, nitpicky thing, and maybe you won’t care or even notice, but for some reason Isaac’s uncanny silence drew my attention in Dead Space, and made me wish he had more than merely a physical role to play.

Quick tech-y sidenote: If you’re thinking about running the PC version and you’re wondering how this thing performs, try “amazingly.” I’ve got it running at the highest all around detail settings in Boot Camp mode on a 2.4GHz Macbook Pro with 2GB RAM and a measly NVIDIA 8600M GT w/256MB VRAM and it’s smooth as glass while somehow managing to look every bit like something that’d run on dual SLI GPUs in a monster rig.