The first episode was just amazing and had some shocking moments. I have been waiting for this episode, but I feel a little letdown this time around. Lee and the gang need to find food because they ran out at the motel they are holding down. You go to try to find food and wind up on a dairy farm, but the food isn’t exactly what you think it might be. There aren’t as many shocking moments, and they don’t come off as surprising as in the first episode. The big moments are more dialog choices than actual gameplay, which is disappointing. One moment does have you chopping off a guy’s leg stuck in a bear trap, but other than that, the other moments are pretty typical, like yanking a gun out of a guy’s hand. In fact, there aren’t even really that many zombies in this episode; they kind of take a back seat to the internal struggle on the farm.
The game plays out exactly the same, but there are fewer exploring segments and even fewer puzzles to solve. In fact, this mainly felt like an interactively animated episode rather than an adventure game. Not to say that is bad, but fans of the first episode may find it disappointing. There are some more important choices you have to make, and that is probably the biggest switch from the first episode. Some changes actually determine the lives of a few characters you probably got attached to. Episode 2 does what this series is doing best, and that’s slowly drawing the characters’s personalities out and constantly making you question how you feel about them.
The game isn’t so much tense gameplay-wise as story-wise. The whole time, I was surprised when something did happen. You are thrown important choices and need to make decisions quickly at times when you least expect them, and they really make you think. I had such a hard time picking almost every choice because sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the best thing to do. A lot of times, I wonder how that will affect me later on in the series.
Overall, Episode 2 doesn’t have as much action or surprising moments, but it expands the character’s personality and gives you some seriously heavy situations that force you to make big decisions. The episode also puts zombies on the back burner for the problems on this farm and the group, so be prepared for that.
Ever since the entertainment industry was born, man has always loved to be scared. Despite our curiosity about death, we loathe it every day, yet we surround ourselves with it in an ironic twist. Dead Space 2 is just a dot on the timeline of horror and death in the media, and we suck it up like candy. What makes Dead Space 2 quench our curiosity for horror and push the human mind to its psychological limits? The story of Isaac Clarke aboard The Sprawl and returning to the Ishimura may hold the answers.
Isaac Clarke wakes up in a straight jacket and is being chased by Necromorphs once again. He has to destroy the marker, but he doesn’t know how. His journey through The Sprawl is very dangerous and gut-wrenching, but I guarantee you’ll love it. The combat is pretty much the same but feels slightly tighter and a little more responsive this time around. De-limbing Necromorphs is as satisfying as ever and proves to be pretty scary and gruesome. You can now use your telekinesis module in combat, such as throwing limbs and objects at enemies to kill them, but I rarely use this method.
There are a ton of weapons at your disposal, but upgrading them all takes a couple of playthroughs since power nodes are harder to come by, and you really need to rely on buying them. The new weapon (there’s only one, sadly) is the javelin gun, which lets you launch spears at enemies and impale them on walls. A secondary fire mode allows you to electrify the spear to shock nearby enemies or do extra damage. It seems a little overpowered, but it works well on larger enemies.
Speaking of new Necromorphs, there are a few great ones. The Stalkers are really great enemies because they hide, peek around corners, and rush you. Using the force gun or the javelin gun and using alt-fire are great ways to stop these guys, or just planting mines. The pack is screaming evil-morphed children that rush you into, well, packs. The force gun is the best way around these guys, or the flamethrower. Another new enemy is crawlers, which are morphed infants that cry like babies and whose bodies can explode. Using the force gun or flamethrower works great here too.
Despite the combat being the same, the pacing is great, and the atmosphere is extremely haunting, especially during the first few chapters. The storytelling is deeper thanks to Isaac actually talking and interacting with the characters. The ending is excellent, but the game runs out of steam after the first few chapters and just becomes a hallway grinding shooting fest. This isn’t to say that’s bad because the varied environments are nice to see, but I would have liked more scripted moments.
Some other key elements have changed, such as zero-gravity gameplay. Instead of jumping from fixed point to point, you can now move around freely, and the sections are much longer and more involved. Sometimes a whole chapter will be in zero gravity, and this includes being out in deep space. I really liked this change, which is probably one of the biggest in the game.
I really feel as if the story mode was well planned out, but the middle of the game is pretty straightforward and keeps the game from getting a higher score. The game is also a lot harder and pretty relentless in doling out enemies at you without stopping. You really need to stay on your toes this time around, and strategy is key to figuring out which weapons work in which situations. So, with the first few chapters and last few being the best, the rest of the game is just mainly atmosphere, but it’s paced well, and that matters a lot.
The multiplayer suite is unusual, but only addictive for a little while. This isn’t like Call of Duty or Halo, where you’ll be coming back for dozens of hours at a time. It plays a lot like the single-player game where you blast away Necromorphs, but humans control those too, and they keep respawning until the objectives are met. You can collect health packs, ammo, etc., but Necromorphs are pretty relentless. There are four types you can play as, and each has its own unique abilities. Ganging up on humans is the best strategy, but sometimes the whole ordeal feels unbalanced since this is a tricky way of doing multiplayer for a game that wasn’t designed for that. The multiplayer is thrilling after a while, but once you play all the maps and classes for a few hours, you’ll be done.
Collector’s Edition: If you want to dish out an extra $20, you get a nice plasma cutter replica that lights up and is built rather nicely. You also get a pointless comic panel, the Zealot force gun and armor, plus the soundtrack. It’s a nice package for $20, and the PS3 version gets Dead Space: Extraction (originally a Wii exclusive) that’s compatible with the Move (but you can use a controller!). Even gamers who aren’t hardcore fans will love this.
A lot of movie-based games have a lot of potential but fall flat due to shortcuts, bad production values, or just rushed and unfinished work. Saw is one of these games that suffers from this disease, but it’s not a terrible game. You play Detective Tapp, who must find and help various people seen in the movies through traps, but there are small traps you must get through to advance through areas and find items to also advance through areas. This is where Saw should be great: gore. It falls flat; there is a sense that everything feels stale and nothing has any weight or impact on it. When a head pops, it’s no more exciting than a bubble. There’s not much gore other than a red blob on someone’s head and no cringe factor. The movies made me even feel sick and queasy, but the game does nothing for me.
Controlling the character feels floaty and weightless, kind of like those first-generation PS2 games. Combat involves a simple lock-on button and attacking, and it works except that it’s as simple as A-B-C. You can pick up various weapons, such as crutches, lead pipes, scalpels, etc., but they have a damage meter, so after a few hits, they break apart. Enemies are as dumb as they come, and blocking their path by shutting doors can help, but they really can’t kill you since they even struggle to target you.
When it comes to exploring, the game is linear to a fault, with literally narrow corridors everywhere. Sometimes you’ll come to a candle with a tape from Jigsaw or some type of document you can read, but the clues in the game are very vague or too obvious. Most of the traps that you must get through to advance through the levels are pretty mundane and not very interesting. These range from finding a code on the wall to a lock, reaching inside some nasty thing to grab a key, or timed lock mini-games. I want to see gruesome stuff, not silly interpretations of things we’ve seen before. Saw is a game that could really innovate mature audience-inspired games with some pretty brutal stuff.
After you slog through this, you can finally get to the finals, which are a bigger main trap, but not all of these are interesting and are pretty much more glorified versions of the advancement puzzles. Neither are very gory, look brutal, or are as convincing as the movies, and it’s the graphics that really transpire this. They look very dated, and the technology doesn’t allow a lot of detail. If these guys could get a sophisticated engine, they could make this game look fantastic, but they opted for the cheap engine instead. They did capture the Saw atmosphere really well, but the shock value is pretty much nonexistent.
Overall, Saw is a decent rental, but it’s not one that you’re going to walk away feeling great about, but instead depressed at how lame the game is instead of how great it could be. The game does support an Xbox 360 controller, but people who prefer the keyboard and mouse will be clueless as to what controls what because numbers don’t really help and there are no tutorials. The puzzles, however, are varied enough to keep you interested, and there are some fun doozies in there, but other than that, this is a huge disappointment.
Survival horror is a slowly dying genre, and the king of the genre, Silent Hill, is barely keeping it alive. Shattered Memories is the first American-made Silent Hill, and the whole formula has pretty much changed. Hardcore fans will probably not like this, but the elements that make SH scary are still intact. The game is more about enjoying the experience and less about winning. Puzzles are very simple; there’s no combat, so it’s all about exploration and atmosphere.
You play Harry Mason, who wakes up from a car crash to look for his daughter Cheryl. He runs into different characters (including a MILF’d-up Cibil), and you run around the town of Toluca to find her. In between sequences, you are in therapy sessions, which consist of mini-games and are pretty neat because they change the outcome of the story and the ending. This is a new element for the SH series, and I hope it comes back in some form.
Once you step into the dark, you run around with your flashlight and are basically trying to find mementos and trigger sequences, such as when the screen gets staticky. This means that there is something nearby that will send you some sort of message on your phone. While these are creepy, you can also snap pictures with your phone camera, and this is usually also worked into puzzles.
When you see a white triangle above something, that means you can interact with it. These can be little micro-puzzles because you use a hand to push and pull things. While this was obviously created for the Wii version, it works great here on the PSP. Most puzzles aren’t nearly as mind-bending as past SH games because most of the time the key is in the same room as the locked door, and clues usually don’t need more decrypting. What may get you there is navigating the nightmare sequences.
Now, these are different from the air raid siren bringing rust that consumers SH in past games. Usually, a scene will trigger something, and ice will start covering the room. As you run around, you must find the X that’s on your map, because it’s usually a puzzle you have to solve to continue. While you run around, scary creatures chase you, and you must knock down objects to block their path and let them know you’ve been there before. Some sequences have you running around hallways and bringing you in circles until you go into the right sequence of doors. These sections can be quite hair-raising because of the music and sounds of the creatures, and if they catch you, you have to shake them off via on-screen prompts.
There are some unique parts of the game that make it cinematic, such as riding in cars in the first person, figuring out how to get out of them, and the first-person swimming sequence at the end of the game. Silent Hill has never been quite so cinematic before, and it’s a great addition. Despite all this, the game has a great twist ending and enough uniquity to keep you busy to the end. However, the departure from traditional Silent Hill elements may make some people hate this game. The game looks amazing on the PSP and really feels like it was built from the ground up for the device. This is a top-notch title for the handheld, and we need more of them.
The survival horror genre is probably the fastest-dying of them all, but it’s games like Amnesia that really get the spotlight when they hit it home on the scare factor. Amnesia stays true to the genre, and this is due to the fact that there’s no combat whatsoever. Zero, zilch, nada, you can’t fight. If you see a creature, you have to hide or run, and this is what adds to the tension. If you can fight, you can just kill it, but if you can’t, then you have to really think about what to do, which can make you not want to continue.
Amnesia may be a first-person adventure game, but your only weapon is light and against your own insanity, not creatures. Staying in the light is key, and oil for your lantern is as precious as 9mm ammo in Silent Hill. It’s scarce, and you try to savor every drop or just use tinderboxes as an alternative. You can light candles, lamps, or any source of light to guide your way to preserve oil or if you run out. Daniel can see in the dark somewhat, but it’s hard to solve puzzles like this.
As your sanity slowly drains, you will hallucinate, walk slower, the screen will distort, and creatures will hear you. Seeing traumatic scenes can do this too, as can looking at creatures for too long. You will also lose sanity if you don’t progress or solve puzzles, so it keeps you on your toes, but don’t worry, I only encountered a couple of times where Daniel went totally insane and lost it. You’ll more likely go insane from fright before he ever does.
And that’s the thing about amnesia: it frightens you with atmosphere, pacing, and tension from the environment instead of zombies popping out. The music and ambiance are haunting, and they make you paranoid throughout the whole game. One scene had me in a room where I was picking up a letter, and suddenly something started bashing down the door. I literally jumped and tried to find a place to hide. A wardrobe! I grabbed each door and swung them open and hid, and as I peeked through the crack, Daniel started freaking out, so I had to not look. I heard the creature breathing, moaning, and moving around, and I was afraid it would start bashing down the wardrobe! It soon turned away, and I could continue hunting for puzzle solutions, but was I ever so scared?
The haunting story doesn’t help either, with you just waking up in a castle and not knowing who you are. You read letters along the way, trying to discover some orb and stop the shadow from consuming you. I can’t go into more detail because it will spoil the story, but it’s very creepy and disturbing and was well put together.
The second part of the game is the puzzles. These vary from object hunting to physics and pathfinding. I have to admit that Frictional has always been known for obscure puzzles, and some of the time I didn’t know what to do and was completely clueless. You rarely get hints, and this can lead to frustrating backtracking and pixel hunting, so an FAQ needs to be handy. Other than that, the puzzles were clever and really stuck to the story, and they all felt necessary.
Amnesia is a horror classic and is even better than Frictional’s Penumbra series. This game will scare the pants off of you; it even clocks in at a nice 6–8 hours and has three different endings to see. I really hope for a sequel or another game similar because Frictional found the survival horror sweet spot.
What defines an atmosphere? It’s the portrayal of a setting and world that feels authentic in the sense that it can make you feel you’re in it. It can scare you, make you feel like a superhero, or make you feel full of magic. The atmosphere in a game is extremely important and with the latest technology developers can bring us more authentic settings.
While Metro 2033 didn’t see much light from retail it has one of the most amazing and scary atmospheres ever created. Feeling all alone in a subway in Russia with just a lighter, gas mask, shoddy handmade weapons, and the sounds of creepy dogs howling down the tunnel? Only one clip left and there could be ten or more? That is one scary situation, and even the outside environments are incredibly hostile feelings. The mix of enemy camps with stealth missions makes you feel desperate, and if you get caught the whole world will come down on you.
I love first-person shooters with a great atmosphere, and Cryostasis pulls this off well. While the story is pretty confusing and never really makes any sense at all (even at the end), you at least know why you’re here. You are moving through a Russian nuclear icebreaker that was destroyed after hitting an iceberg (sound familiar?). You walk around finding dead bodies, and upon touching them, you can relive the moments leading to their deaths and try to prevent them so you can continue getting through the area that is blocked. This also provides more backstory on how the ship actually hit the iceberg and why.
The game is a first-person shooter, so you get some guns, but the game is slow-paced and not a high-octane shooter like most people like. You move very slowly, and you have to take your time aiming since these guns don’t exactly fire at a high rate. You get several different types, such as bolt-action rifles, a Tommy gun, a water cannon (that uses icicles!), and even a flare gun. The aiming is slow, like I mentioned, and you just feel like you’re shooting in slow motion. This isn’t entirely bad since you can take your time and aim because ammo is a tad scarce. You do, however, never feel like your guns are very powerful, even against weaker enemies. But you don’t get guns right away since, for a good 25% of the game, you get to use melee weapons.
The enemies in the game are pretty unique and not just average cannon fodder. These enemies are pretty creepy, look great, and behave decently towards your actions. Some swing axes and some shoot back, but they are all pretty hard to take down, especially the bigger guys later on.
The game doesn’t really consist of puzzles, but it is sometimes a linear maze. You do flip switches and activate heat sources (more on that later), but there are no actual puzzles in the game. This game makes things a bit dull and feels monotonous since the tone of the game never really changes, and even the atmosphere wears thin before the end. You’re opening a lot of doors, flipping a lot of switches, and shooting some bad guys, and that’s about it. This game is really only for people who are into atmosphere and stories.
You can use any heat source, such as lamps, lights, heaters, fires—you name it—to recharge your health. There are two meters, and the outer one shows how warm the room is or the heat source. You can only heal up to where that meter stops, and then you have your endurance gauge for sprinting.
The game looks pretty good, and you need a monster rig to run it with DirectX 10 and get the best-looking settings. The textures are highly detailed, and you can even watch the ice melt and watch the water run down walls in real-time. Of course, this was one of the very first DX10 games, so there are plenty of glitches. The PS 4.0 has a problem making animations jerky, so you have to fiddle around with minimizing to the desktop and changing it from 3 to 4 to get it to stop. The game will crash at random sometimes, and there are some weird, out-of-nowhere glitches throughout. This makes the game very frustrating to play, even if you have a hefty rig.
The game can feel like a chore towards the end because the pace never changes and is just deliberately slow, and the story just never makes sense. However, it has something about it that makes you keep playing regardless of all this, but people who like fast action should stay away. Cryostasis could have been a lot better with a more stable engine, better shooting, and a more steady pace instead of just being slow throughout. If you have the rig to run this game and the patience, then Cryostasis is your thing.
Update (06/14/18): The game has actually been pulled off of Steam as of late and does not run on Windows 10 or modern GPUs. This is such a shame, as it can easily be run on any GPU from the last 5–6 years with no problems. If you want to pick up a copy, you need to find someone who has it in their Steam library.
Silent Hill 4 is a continuation of the long-running Silent Hill series that started on the PlayStation way back in 1998. As a kid, I remember how incredibly horrifying SH was and how ridiculously hard the puzzles were, thus sending the rental back due to complaints of nightmares to my mother. Fast forward to 2004, and we get SH4, which is a mediocre approach to the amazing survival horror series. For some reason, Konami changed everything for this game, thus making it less fun and a major chore to play. You play Henry Townshend, who wakes up in his apartment one day with the front door chained up. You walk into your bathroom, and there is a hole in it that is a wormhole to these creepy SH worlds. You are following the murders of a man named Walter Sullivan and must release his soul and find out why he’s killing all of these people. The story is very interesting, yet there are few cut scenes and very little dialog, so most of the story is told through diary pages and memos that you pick up, which is actually kind of bland and boring (and lazy on Konami’s part).
SH4 is very strange in the sense that the game uses an initial gateway between levels, and you travel back and forth to heal, save, and unlock the rest of the world. After you finish the world, you get warped back to your apartment room 302, and you are free to roam around. This is in a strange first-person view, and you can save (this is the only save spot) and dump stuff into your trunk for later storage. You only get about 10 slots in your inventory, so going back to your apartment via red holes is essential. While this isn’t so bad, there’s so much backtracking and repeating of levels that it will make you sick. While you’re on a level, you wander around in the same SH fashion, picking up strange objects and using them in puzzles. The only problem is that the memos that give you the puzzles are so unbelievably vague that you will have almost no idea what to do unless you wander around aimlessly, just trying everything out. In most SH games, you do this, but it’s pretty obvious where to go. If you use a little bit of brainpower, you will get it. In SH4, things are so obvious that you will completely miss them.
This is all tied together because SH4 has the worst level design ever, and those are just paths that lead nowhere. You will wander around hallways and go up and down ladders that lead to dead-end rooms or send you back to places you don’t recognize. Not only this, but if you miss certain items (like the Swords of Obedience), the “boss” later on cannot be fought, and there’s no way to go back. Thanks to the whole gateway system, if you miss an item, you cannot go back, unlike in past SH games. There are four worlds that you must complete by finding a placard at the end of each level. In SH fashion, you must complete weird puzzles by putting the right pieces in the right places, and this is figured out by the memos you pick up. As I explained above, they are so vague that you can’t really figure out what to do except look through a walkthrough.
After you complete the world, you go back to your apartment, look through the peephole in your door, and read all these pages to advance the story. After you complete the fourth world, everything changes, and your room becomes haunted. You must use holy candles that you find throughout the world and place them down in front of these demons on your walls to rid them before they kill you. I found this extremely annoying and pointless gameplay element, which just makes this SH game very weird and a bad departure from the series. After completing these four worlds, you open up another whole of your washroom (yeah, what?!). With the four placards, you go back through these worlds again, trying to find God knows what, but the levels are continuous, and you don’t get warped back to your apartment (thus not getting healed). I found this really annoying and very boring since I just spent hell in these worlds and I have to go back?!
Now the boss fights are really stupid since they aren’t traditional SH bosses; they just look like regular enemies, and you must hack away at them till they fall, then stab them with that sword of obedience I mentioned. This is both boring and stupid since if you miss a word, you just have to run away from this boss until you finish the level. Now, if I should mention improvements, the combat is actually really great since you just lock on and whack away. You can charge attacks, but that’s about it. If you play on a harder difficulty, you’re going to be SOL because the game can be extremely tough since they throw dozens of enemies at you at times. The only weapons in the game are melee weapons, a pistol, and a revolver. Yeah, lame. Where’s the shotgun? Halfway through the game, you have your neighbor, Eileen, following you everywhere, and this is extremely annoying since you can’t leave her behind, and she hobbles on one leg, so she’s very slow. She has to be near you before you go through doors, or you leave her behind. This was a huge gameplay mistake, and it’s probably just as bad as the level design.
Now the only thing I haven’t mentioned is the scary factor. Is it as scary as past SH games? The answer is no. The enemy designs are a little creepy, but not out of this world terrifying like the past SH games. Are the levels creepy? Not really. Sometimes you’ll see something weird in the background, but you won’t really notice it. The atmosphere is a little spooky, but nothing that’ll make you crap your pants. The past SH games scared the living hell out of me, but SH4 didn’t really do much for the scary factor. I feel SH4 is really toned down, and Konami tried to do something new but failed at it. The siren doesn’t even go off in SH4!! C’mon… If you played the hell out of the other SH games, then go ahead and pick this up at bargain bin prices, but don’t expect a whole lot.
Boy, do I love this game? Actually, I hate this game and love it at the same time. This is probably one of the best-looking DS games out there right now. With this FPS survival horror running at 60 FPS, it’s fast, smooth, and very creepy. Yes, the game is actually creepy, kind of like Silent Hill creepy. The game is full of weird monsters, mind-boggling puzzles, and a creepy atmosphere and ambiance.
The game controls really well, but the actual size of the DS makes your wrists cramp up and go numb all the time. If you’ve played Metroid Prime: Hunters, then you know the whole setup, but if you haven’t, then I’ll tell you. You move your reticule around with the stylus, so this feels real and also makes things a lot easier (yeah, PSP!) while you move around with the A, B, X, and Y (if you’re left-handed) or the D-pad (if you’re right-handed). You have your inventory right under your health bar (which is your heart monitor), so you can just touch the weapons you want on the fly, and this makes combat easy and fast.
While the gameplay is pretty straightforward (double tap B or Up to run), you just run around shooting the weird monsters and solving the annoying puzzles. Yes, I said annoying because the hallways all look the same, and it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinthine buildings and hallways with a terrible map and no sense of direction. This is not good since your wrists are cramping and going numb while you hold them in 20 different positions. The map is just a bunch of lines with yellow dots for doors, and there’s no way to tell where you have been. You can write on your notepad and leave notes, but this proves useless for the map and only good for jotting down clues and codes for keypads.
The whole level design is just stupidly annoying, with fallen-over vending machines, desks, chairs, and anything else a hospital has blocking hallways and doors, so you have to find your way around everything. Since you lose track of where you were last, you’ll tear your hair out because of the retarded save system, and this kills the whole game. You’ll spend a good 20 minutes on one level and then die because there are 10 enemies coming after you and you only have 3 bullets. Dying forces you to restart the entire chapter all over again, even when you and the boss fight at the end of the chapter. I really tried loving this game since I absolutely adore survival horror games and I’m very forgiving with them (read my Alone in the Dark review), so I suffered through 5/16 chapters. The thing is, it wasn’t so bad until I picked up the game again four months later and realized why I stopped playing—the retarded save system.
I also really hate how ammo is so scarce in the game when there are so many enemies to fight off; this and the fact that enemies respawn when you re-enter a room means all the ammo you saved up for the boss is now spent on enemies you killed four times already. I don’t know what Gamecock was thinking, but they must not play survival horror games much. Survival horror games need to have really good maps, a way to save clues, no respawning enemies, and a good save system. The whole point is to “survive,” so you have to scrounge what you have around you. This game really shows how to NOT make a survival horror game, so please just consider this before even renting this game.
What made me actually want to like the game is that it looks so amazing and plays so damn well. The game is very creepy, with eerie music and spooky sound effects such as babies crying, water dripping, doors creaking, lightning, thunder, and rain pounding on roofs. The game is also very dark, so you need your trusty flashlight, and this is where the “Doom 3 meets Silent Hill” aspect comes in since you can only either use your flashlight or your gun. Since the DS isn’t very powerful, there’s a black “fog of war” all around you, so when you turn your flashlight off for some reason, you can only see two steps in front of you, but your flashlight can illuminate a 30-foot hall. This is actually a hardware fault and nothing on the developerspart, but you really don’t even notice it. The game’s monsters are very creepy, with zombies that have their chests open up and shoot poison at you, weird creepy things that crawl around the ceilings, nasty slugs that give out high-pitched sonic screams, and really freaky bosses that I can’t even begin to describe. There’s blood all over the walls, broken windows, papers, books, and whatever you can think of thrown everywhere, so the whole place feels deserted and you feel like you’re all alone.
I don’t remember much about the story, but I do remember that you wake up in a hospital and you are trying to find your way out, so it has a Silent Hill feel there. The game also has highly detailed textures and great lighting effects (as I’ve described), like lights (and your flashlight) flickering on and off, and there’s lots of detail in everything. Puzzles are solved by finding papers and clues as to where to find keys and codes, and even by solving certain random puzzles to open boxes, doors, etc. If you want an idea of what the puzzles are like they are exactly like the Silent Hill puzzles we have all grown to hate so you know what to expect. Overall, the game looks and plays great, but the punishing saves system, scarce ammo and health, maze-like hallways, and terrible map ruin this otherwise great survival horror experience.
Well, well, well, EA finally pulls itself together. After this and the upcoming Mirror’s Edge, I think EA finally got some brains that we’re full of new IP and original content. Dead Space is a superbly gruesome and atmospherically terrifying game that goes above and beyond the call of duty (no pun intended) when it comes to atmosphere, story, and gameplay ideas. The story is really unique, and it’s been ages since a great new original story has blossomed in the horror genre. You are Isaac Clarke, who is a repairman sent out to the Ishimura to find out why there are no communications on that ship. The ship is known as a “Planetcracker” and is carrying a mysterious relic called “The Marker,” and Isaac finds everyone aboard dead and the place deserted, except for extremely creepy monsters, a couple crazy doctors, and his girlfriend. Yeah, it’s a superb story, and it’ll keep you hooked throughout, but it won’t really unfold until the last three levels.
Let’s go right into gameplay. You can buy five different weapons (yeah, this game needs more weapons). They are the plasma cutter, ripper, flamethrower, force gun, contact beam, and line gun. They are all cool weapons, yet there is a twist: they’re tools, not guns. Isaac is a repairman, not a one-man-army mercenary or ex-military dude. This guy was not trained for combat, and he must learn very quickly how to defend himself. This makes the game feel even more creepy and makes you feel more helpless since you have to make do with what you have. What I loved is that everything is displayed visually, so there are no meters, bars, or gauges telling you your health and ammo. Everything is displayed to you. You have your health bar, which is a bar on your suit; your stasis bar is on your back (more on stasis later); your ammo is displayed holographically when you’re using your weapons; and so is your flashlight.
Everything in the game is easily accessible, and the controls are well mapped out. You can use melee combat by stomping on enemies or punching them. While you’ll not want to do this since it’s a bit clunky, it saves your butt in hairy situations. The way you kill enemies is by dismembering them to do extra damage. If you shoot their legs off, they’ll crawl to you. If you shoot their arms off, they’ll bite you to death. If you shoot one arm and one leg off, they’ll still crawl to you, decapitate them, and well, they’ll still try to kill you! If you get overwhelmed, just use your stasis and slow them; this is a must-do for some creatures like the Twitchers, who run ultra-fast. The creatures are very disturbing and are probably some of the sickest and most twisted things created in a game I’ve ever seen. These things are nasty, and you just feel the pain when you realize they were all once humans (most of them). There are also lots of cinematic sequences, like when a tentacle arm grabs your leg and it’s dragging you down a hall while you’re trying to shoot it off. There are HUMONGOUS boss fights, some turret gun sections, etc.
You’ll never get bored with the game since the scores vary so much. You’ll walk down a hall and a guy will be petting his dismembered leg and then fall over dead; you’ll hear a nurse laugh hysterically and blow her brains out; people will be killed behind bulletproof glass, etc. The game has a very disturbing atmosphere, and you really do get scared with all of the amazing ambient sound effects that will keep you on the edge and make you jump constantly. Dead Space does everything differently from other horror games since it’s all so surreal because of the way it’s done. You really do feel abandoned on a ship that once bustled with life. The graphics are also absolutely amazing; these are some of the best graphics seen so far, and they are breathtaking. There’s not much I can say except see it for yourself; you’ll be blown away!
There are segments that have zero gravity and vacuums. Zero-gravity sections have you jumping around the room, solving puzzles, and shooting things. These are very interesting, and they change the pace a lot. When you enter a vacuum, you are on an air timer, and if you don’t have any spare air, you’re dead! You can upgrade everything via workbenches by finding or buying power nodes. These work like “trees,” where you have to fill a path to that upgrade with nodes. Each weapon has different upgrade specs, and you won’t be able to upgrade them all in one play-through. In fact, it’ll take about two playthroughs to get all the achievements. There is plenty to do in the game, and the achievements are not impossible to get (like in FEAR!!! or Burnout Revenge!!!), so don’t panic.
All I have left to say is that Dead Space is absolutely amazing, and I’d give it a higher score if there were more enemy types, more weapons, and just a bit more variety. There’s enough to keep you interested through a couple of playthroughs, and I hope there will be a sequel (wait, it’s EA, of course there will be!) (Until we hate it.) There are six Dead Space comics available that you can pick up for about $15 each. I HIGHLY suggest reading these since they fill you in about a few weeks before the game takes place. They have the same atmosphere and storytelling as the game, and they are a really good read. Dead Space is one of the best horror-action games made, and this will be a piece of gaming history. I also look forward to the next few sequels.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.