May 21, 2011

Aww, It Thinks It Has A Plot. How Cute.

Dead Space 2 is a fantastic game that you should play.

I dragged my feet playing the original until 2 came out, when I started hearing so much about how great it was. The original demo for Dead Space had not really been my thing, but my experiences with RE5 got me to give it a shot. Once I got into it, and started enjoying the customization mechanics and so on, I really, really loved it. Of course I wanted to play the sequel, and I will admit, the sequel was better in pretty well every way. I would still play the original. It’s fun. But Dead Space 2 really refines things into a fantastic game that should not be missed.

The same focus on skill shots is there. They’ve even introduced a new enemy who really makes you focus on that even more: these goo-spitting dudes. When they hit you with their goo, you can’t run. You move super-slowly, so hitting limbs from a distance before you get surrounded becomes even more important, because you’re unable to get away if you miss. They really up the intensity, and the game uses them liberally, which I approve of.

There are new weapons, sure, but the Plasma Cutter remains the best pistol in gaming, or at least close to it. You really don’t need another weapon, and using the Plasma Cutter feels fantastic! They did nerf my go-to weapon of choice from the last game, the Ripper, by making it’s melee range significantly shorter, but it’s a better weapon for it. It makes the alt fire actually have some use, and makes the decision to use it a tough one: you can destroy enemies with it easily, but you have to get in close. It’s much more risk-reward, and is more fun for it. They also tried to make Kinesis more fun by letting you impale people with blade-limbs from monsters and poles strewn about the environment. I have never found throwing stuff in the environment around as a weapon fun, even in something like Half-Life 2, where it was novel, but I know some people do, so I’m sure they can have fun with that. Finally, they changed Stasis to something that recharges over time. It’s really slow in the beginning, but you can upgrade it, of course, and having it recharge makes it much more a part of combat. It also makes those stasis recharge items even more of a waste of space in your inventory, but what are you going to do.

What really struck me about this game is how it wants me to care about it’s characters. It wants me to suddenly care about the protagonist, Issac Clarke, who was just a silent nobody who was good at shooting things in the first game. It wants me to care about the people on the Titan station, and the fate of the world where some weird cult is making a ton of monsters. It really wants me to take this seriously, and I honestly find it laughable. I think my friends on the On the Stick podcast said it best when they said that Dead Space is a “video-game-ass video game.” There is no way this could be more of a video game than it is. The store system, the upgrades, all of these are clearly game systems, and make little actual sense if you tried to put it in a real-world context. Even less sense are the monsters. There’s no way any sort of twisted world would make something die faster by cutting limbs off than by shooting center mass. It is a very game-y premise. There’s nothing wrong with it being so game-y. It’s what makes it fun as fuck to play. But when you have all these things in the game, and then you’re also expecting me to take your characters seriously and be scared by the silly-looking monsters that I have butchered a million times before, well, that’s just silly. I know you have to have some sort of plot, but I don’t think Dead Space 2 went in the right direction with it. I mean, they’re obviously trying to be a “trans-media property” with their movies and comic books and shit, which is why their story came to the forefront. But it’s really silly.

Still, the story makes the environments in this game much more varied, and to great effect. Titan is a city, and as such has a bunch of really neat places to cut the limbs off of monsters in, and I approve of that. They even do some really good stuff near the end of the game that are callbacks to the first. Spoilers, you eventually end up on the Ishamura again, and the only real scares I had in the game was when Issac’s hallucinations made me, for a moment, relive some of the most tense moments from the first game. Good job, Visceral. That worked for you.

I didn’t play the multiplayer, because I have no idea why this game has multiplayer. But there is a ton of replay value in this game. Crazy difficulty modes, new game +, lots of unlockables… if you like replaying games, Dead Space 2 is for you. I don’t replay games, but I appreciate them putting that effort into putting those into the package. It’s neat. Game designers don’t do that shit anymore.

Yeah, Dead Space 2: Fantastic. Probably won’t be my game of the year, but it will probably be in my top 10, certainly. It’s a game purely based around fantastic, addictive mechanics, and does a much better job of keeping the flow going from scene to scene than the first game. This is something anyone who likes to shoot things should play.

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