Battlemouth

The holiday rush of games has begun, every week we’re being bombarded with blockbuster titles one after the other.  I’ve been trying my best to get my hands on and play some of the more exciting titles.  The first  on the list was EA’s Dead Space, hopefully I can keep up pace with so many more on the horizon!

Dead Space puts you in the shoes of space engineer Isaac Clarke with the ultimate goal of saving a doomed ship and humanity from some crazy aliens.  I assure you the back of the box states the plot far more eloquently but for now that works.

I’ll get my biggest gripe with the game out of the way now so I can just praise it the rest of the time.  In Dead Space every mission is essentially this “Hey we need you to do this, but you need to get a key from here to open that. Oh crap its broken now you need to fix that but its key is in there with the that and those etc”.  There were instances where I laughed at how silly some of the missions were when being assigned.

Besides that I found very few opportunities to laugh and in fact was more inclined to wimper of yelp.  Dead Space gets the whole atmospheric spooky ambience thing down perfectly, I often found myself standing in empty rooms listening to everything going on.  Graphics are gorgeous as well, with rich colors and textures that really add to the whole feel of the game.

Combat consists of dismembering enemies until they’re little hunks of meat that cant hurt you.  Doing this can be frantic and fun, especially with the lovely array of weapons you have at your disposal.  You usually get bombarded by waves of enemies coming from all directions and different speeds, certainly gets the heart pumping.

Game play overall was consistently fun with the game mixing things up by taking away gravity or oxygen for certain parts of the game.  The ability to use kenesis and stasis abilities also come in quite handy during many portions of the game.  You’re also able to upgrade your armor and abilities by collecting and purchasing power nodes, this let me make a crazy strong pistol to ruin everyone with.

If you’re looking to get scared but have fun while you’re doing it check out Dead Space, it is about time EA released something that wasnt a sequel or wonky spin off.