Dead Space (Xbox 360)

Isaac Clarke is an engineer on a routine mission to restore communications to the USG Ishimura, a mining ship that sent out a distress call during an excavation operation and then went silent. When his team arrive on the scene the ship appears to be completely dead, so after a badly botched docking procedure they set off to find out what happened...

Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that the Ishimura is in a bit of a state when you arrive. There’s little power, most of the systems are malfunctioning or destroyed, and none of the crew appear to be present. Whilst trying to get the ship back online, your team are confronted with some rather unpleasant creatures in the shape of Necromorphs – vicious spiky things that bear a passing resemblance to badly mutated humans. Panic ensues, leaving you separated from your team, and from then on you’re on your own as you try to get enough of the ship functional to let you meet up again.

Dead Space is the computer game component of a new intellectual property published by Electronic Arts, which also includes comics and animated films based around the game world – think Animatrix, but scarier. It’s generally considered to be representative of the survival horror genre, but focuses more on action that the puzzles found in the Alone In The Dark and Resident Evil series. The emphasis is firmly on alternating between unease and terror as you guide Isaac around the devastated Ishimura from a third person perspective.

The first thing that strikes you upon taking control of Isaac is that is that the traditional head up displays and on-screen information have been completely removed – developers Visceral Games didn’t want anything to break the sense of immersion in the environment and remind you that you’re behind a screen. The information you’ll need has been cleverly incorporated into Isaac’s suit, your weapons and a holographic projected inventory system. If you look at Isaac’s back you’ll see a glowing blue tube that runs along his spine – this represents his health, and gives an instant reminder of the severity of your situation by fading to yellow at dangerously low levels. The semicircular gauge to the right shows how much stasis energy you have stored (more of that later) and in situations where Isaac finds himself in a vacuum his remaining air supply in minutes is projected onto the back of his neck. Hitting the inventory button floats a holographic screen in the air in front of Isaac, which can display your items, a 3D map, and mission logs. The upshot of this is that you’re not going to be getting a break from the action by dropping into your inventory – the game continues around you while you’re reading - so the emphasis is on being prepared before diving into the unknown.

Don’t expect the unknown to cut you any slack either. Even in the darkest, most decrepit corners of the Ishimura you’ll be haunted by all sorts of unsettling noises and systems failures. Hearing necromorphs scuttling overhead through air ducts and knowing that any minute they may choose to burst out through the nearest wall isn’t at all pleasant. The effects and voice acting are superb throughout and create an oppressive atmosphere that turns relatively normal environments into a forboding no-mans-land.

The necromorphs themselves are truly nasty, all spikes and teeth and ranging from tiny three legged spiders and leaping, spike-firing mutant babies to.. actually, I won’t tell you about the worst of them -I don’t want to ruin the shock. They take a lot of killing too, and that’s where one of the more unique aspects of the game comes into play. Isaac’s weapons are mostly bodged together from his engineering tools – you’ll get a remote circular saw, a plasma cutter, and a blowtorch pumped up into a fully fledged flamethrower for example – so that means they don’t deal damage in a traditional way. Just as well really, as decapitating a necromorph with a headshot is only going to annoy it, and it’ll go beserk and start lashing out blindly as a result. Various communications you’ll find in the game suggest that removing limbs might be a helpful tactic, something the Dead Space developers lovingly refer to as ‘strategic dismemberment’.

To help you with this, the weapons often fire in lines or patterns. The plasma cutter initially fires a vertical slice of energy about a foot wide but can be flipped through 90 degrees with a prod of the alternate fire button. Tentacles often grow sideways, legs are vertical – I’ll leave you to deduce the rest. You’ll also get some nice toys in the form of timed laser mines fired by the line gun, and a fun ‘death blossom’ effect from the pulse rifle as Isaac turns it briefly into a deadly, laser packing spinning top. It has to be said that a few of the weapons seem to have more issues than benefits and take a lot of upgrading before they become useful so you’ll probably end up just sticking with two or three. There’s a tactical advantage to doing this too as you’ll only find ammo that’ll fit the guns you’re carrying, so you don’t end up with a little of everything rather than a lot of something worthwhile.

Isaac also has a couple of tricks quite literally up his sleeve in the form of kinesis and stasis. The former allow you to attract objects towards you, drag them around or repel them with force, and the latter creates a bubble of slow time that can be used to slow down dangerous mechanisms or even enemies. Once you learn to combine these skills (force grab a gas canister from the other side of the room, fire it into a charging necromorph to stun it, encase it in a stasis bubble then lay a couple of timed mines at its feet while it’s trapped) you’ll be in with a fighting chance. When you take into account that different necromorphs need to be killed in different ways in order to keep them back effectively, and that they often attack in mixed groups, you’ll find that shooting everything on first sighting is the quickest way to end up in tiny pieces. There are layers of tactics in the gunplay here that you just don’t get anywhere else.

Dead Space isn’t a particularly long game, with my first runthrough taking around 12 hours, but it has a good deal of replay value in the form of an extra unlockable difficulty level and the ability to start a new round with the same items you had on completion of the previous one. The levels are all fairly small and you’ll be doing a lot of backtracking, but the fact that necromorphs can find their way into previously explored areas means that any psychological comfort gained from exploration is quickly destroyed. There’s also an interesting extra layer of information in the form of graffiti scrawled around the Ishimura in an alien alphabet. Early on you’ll discover a hastily scribbled key to most of this language on the floor, and if you’re of a mind to work it out and translate as you go, you may well end up with a reward..

As a brand new title Dead Space takes a lot of chances, especially coming from a publisher not known for releasing groundbreaking games, but it succeeds on pretty much every front. The horric visuals, intimidating soundscape and carefully studied psychological mind games come together into a superb title that’s a must have for anyone into sci-fi, tactical shooters or survival horror. make no mistakes though - this title definitely deserves its 18 rating and is not for the faint hearted.

9/10