Dead Space -- All-In-One.

Another single entry it seems. I'm attempting to be a little more steadfast in paring down my backlog. I can now remove Dead Space from said list. Dead Space was developed by Electronic Arts at their Redwood Shores location and comes from the team who made The Simpsons Game. Electronic Arts published Dead Space way back in October of 2008. Dead Space is by no means the oldest title in my backlog I'm sad to say. I originally played the demo for Dead Space back in 2008 and decided to pass on the game. The game was released to glowing critical response and player reaction and everyone talks about how the demo was a poor representation of the full game. Amazon has one of their crazy holiday deals and I end up paying half off for a month old game. I have such a weakness to those Amazon deals. Cut to over two years later and the game has sat on my shelf not having been played. The sequel is rapidly approaching and seeing how I'm trying to deal with my backlog Dead Space became an easy choice. I have fully completed the game earning the full thousand points which amounts to playing through the game almost three times. Dead Space is a third-person shooter with a horror motif. The game has the player character arriving to make repairs on a mining ship in the remote reaches of outer space. Of course he arrives to find something horribly amiss. The theme of Dead Space is heavily inspired by the film Event Horizon. As far as gameplay is concerned Dead Space is a solid game mechanically. The gimmick of needing to dismember enemies to kill them works well enough. The zero gravity sections also work rather well. As there was an achievement for playing through the game with just one gun, I did this on my initial playthrough of the game. It wasn't until the second playthrough that I got to mess around with the other weapons available. The different weapons all have a distinct feel and they're outside of the typical standards of pistol, rifle, shotgun, and rocket launcher. They definately give the game a unique feel in that regard. It's too bad the rest of the game doesn't feel as original. The story and stetting all feel familiar. The big plot twist you'll see coming miles away. The horror technique feels familiar as well. They borrow heavily from the Condemned titles. But where Condemned managed to keep me on edge from start to finish Dead Space's scares quickly become tame and predictable. Graphically the game looks good, not great. It's all entirely solid looking. The sound design tries its best to scare you with noises, not so much musically. The score is unremarkable and takes a back seat to sound here. Another thing of note is the ragdoll physics. It's sort of mood breaking. I'm there on a derelict ship in outer space, walking along in the dark, wondering where the next attack is going to come from. Or at least I should be, but instead I'm amused by the corpse that's somehow stuck to my shoes that I've been dragging along with me for the last forty feet. How about the fat enemies that sometimes bounce around the corridors with all the weight of a beach ball once killed? Overall I'd say that Dead Space was pretty good. Nothing about it really excels. I'll be interested in the sequel, when I can get it at reduced price. I'm giving Dead Space a 7.5.