Eyes sunken, unruly stubble adorning his mug and the nightmares of 2 still fresh in his mind, Isaac Clarke’s been through the mangle and thanks to his previous exploits he’s forced to space jump once more into the horrific, limb blasting, Necromorph world with Dead Space 3.
This new edition is good – no doubt. Many of the ingredients we liked about the previous games are back; we’re still cautiously tiptoeing around ventilation shafts, jumping at surprise attacks from behind and even in instances where we know what’s coming, we still panic when the shit hits the fan.
Jason Graves, music composer for the triology, commented to Forbes.com that “The music for the Dead Space series has always been about atmosphere and immersing the player in the game. I wanted the original score to have a mutated, unnatural-yet-organic sound to it (much like the Necromorphs in the game) and the string orchestra is the most adept at performing an amazingly large variety of sounds. Much of the time, the “music” they are playing doesn’t even sound like it’s coming from their instruments! Those unrecognizable sounds became the backbone for all the scores.”
But as with any new addition to a franchise EA and Visceral games needed to offer more:
1) The comeback of the mechanic
From the very start what made Isaac different was that he wasn’t your standard jarhead readily equipped with rifle. He was a mechanic, tooled up with a plasma cutter which gave him an edge to slice through to survival. At least that was the idea, and though 1 and 2 did touch on this, ingenuity gave way to picking up bigger guns in gameplay. In contrast DS3 really brings Isaac’s skills to the forefront. Over and above the tech puzzles, the ability to make weapons at benches from scratch is pretty cool (if you’re into that sort of thing) providing a personalised kit for your own fighting style and suitably varying degrees of carnage. BUT if you’re crap at all that and don’t care whether your Planetcracker also has the ability to propel electrically charged bolts, the game provides readily made schematics, yours for the finding, and bare bones upgrades are easy to get to grips with.
They’ve also done away with credits, so instead of buying upgrades, hunting around and picking up required materials to make stuff becomes important (a job helped by your scavenger bots) making for a far more considered scavenger approach. You need a man with skill, and Isaac is just the man for the job.
2) Bigger/ better?
If we HAD to find a flaw with Dead Space 3 it’s that in a bid to produce a game that looks more expansive it ends up losing some scale. What I mean by that is the first games unnerving atmosphere had a lot to do with the fact you were wandering around the seemingly infinite steel belly of the ghost ship Ishimura. It just felt bigger, making you smaller and less significant, and though jumping between ships to gather materials in the spaceship graveyard created in 3 is fun, none of them are as big. It just doesn’t have that same ominous isolation that comes with being trapped on a single vessel. But I’m nit-picking. Dead Space 3 balances this out with some epic dramatic horror survival moments and the switch of environments from space to icy planet does make for a nice change of pace.
3) Co –op
Though the game features co-op I’ve yet to give this a go. My reasoning is that Dead Space in the first instance should be a single player’s adventure and that that isolation lends significantly to the atmosphere of the game. HOWEVER that’s only applicable to first playthrough and I’m actually intrigued to see how well this is integrated and what that does to the experience with a mate gunning at my side, and whether new content gets thrown into it too....
All in all we’re impressed with Dead Space 3. It’s a game that frequently nods to fans of the series and in many ways goes above and beyond expectations whilst also being accessible to new comers to the franchise. Plenty of scares, some epic moments, ‘Dead’ good.
Angelic Rogue
Images from Google Images and vids from youtube. All image rights to their respective owners.
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