20:07
Dysonarama
The story is set on a giant off planet city, called “ The Sprawl” where engineer, Isaac Clarke wakes from a 3 year coma, to find the necromorph race that he had once destroyed now restored back to it’s full strength, by the ancient artifact that he thought he’d been rid of (the marker). Clarke must fight his way back to the artifact, to destroy it once and for all, but is held back by, seemingly endless waves of infected humans, government conspiracies, faulty station equipment and intensely vivid visions of his dead girlfriend. Throughout the story, Isaac get’s helped by many people, both friend and foe, who all have a particular interest in Isaac’s plan’s for taking out “The Marker” and it becomes clear, very quickly who the “bad guy” is.
Dead Space 2’s thrill orientated gameplay sets the player on a nail-biting journey through the terrible dark void of space and all it’s secrets. When you’re playing dead space, you’ll find yourself hiding in corners for every single room, waiting anxiously for an alien to pop out and scare the crap out of you. Though when you actually step away from the game and think about what scares you, you’ll find that you’re scared by the surrounding sounds and images (dead bodies with missing limbs, blood spattered on the wall, writing on the wall written in blood, sounds of creatures drawing closer to your location, intense music building up to something, ect.) that are shown everywhere.
Dead space 2 makes all the right moves in fun gameplay, from the forced shooting off of limbs to save ammo, to the intensely gory deaths of you failing. The game’s fast paced fighting system leaves no room for boredom, making you leave all your foes with a dismembered corpse, just to make you feel safe in the security that they will stay dead. Enemies jump out at all points of the game, from the ones that look dead on the ground, to the ones that are at the doorway as you open it, making you suspicious of everything that is happening around you. The mini puzzles that you get faced with, like the hacking into door wires so they open, may seem tedious, but when you are being chased by insane amounts of enemies or monsters that only die for a short amount it’s anything but. Even though the gameplay seems flawless, it gets repetitive in the last few chapters, making the excitement that you once felt, seem like a thing of the past.
For amazingly easy entertainment, I recommend that you go around stomping on all the bodies that you’ve recently killed, because somehow hearing Isaac swear his head off as he stomps an already dead enemy to smithereens, is insanely fun. Maybe killing something so gorily, gives you satisfaction after all the times that you’ve been scared, hit or even killed by those aliens. Smashing enemies apart with the heel of your foot also brings great rewards, like ammo packs and health packs, but mostly I did it for the entertainment.
The elaborate and extensive weapon system the game has, almost seem un-necessary when you think about how nearly every single battle that you fight is in a close combat room and every battle that isn’t, is in a zero gravity area, where their normally isn’t anything to shoot. Even though the long range weapons would seem pointless all together, somehow they make the close range fighting so much more fun, for instance if you use the contact beam on an enemy, you somehow manage to blow off every single one of it’s limbs with a single hit, though it consumes a bunch of time, for which enemies can get close enough to tear you apart, but this can then be counted by the contact beams secondary fire (which I won’t ruin for everyone). The use of a secondary fire on every single gun, makes all the guns never really be seen as boring, because they bring in something knew when you thought they couldn’t get any better, e.g. the javelin gun, shoots enemies with great force which pushes them back, then you can use your alternate fire to finish them off by running electricity through their bodies.
One of dead space’s more unique features is the, telekinetic ability that you are able to unfold onto your enemies. The telekinesis consists of two abilities: grabbing items off the ground and throwing them at your enemies, or slowing annoying enemies with an ability called stasis. Throwing things using your telekinesis gives you great advantages in gameplay; you can throw your enemies weapons back at them to give you more time to shoot while they’re on the ground, or you can grab a barrel and throw it at annoying enemies exploding them apart. This ability is also used for puzzles in the game. The stasis ability is used for a great number of creatures, from the annoying mini bosses to the aliens that have to be slowed for you to be able to hit them. This feature is very unique and allows for out of the ordinary entertainment.
The games main fault would be the lack of imagination towards the bosses. The way to kill the main boss of the game (SPOILER ALERT!), is to shoot at them continuously until they vanish away, at which point you turn to the eye of another boss and shoot it until it also vanishes away and you do this until the eye dies, not original in anyway what-so-ever, though the place where they fight is. All the mini bosses in the game also lack imagination, they all have the same idea behind killing them, and that is: “shoot at the bright yellow spots”, no imagination at all, even a fly gets drawn to bright yellow lights, so why make it so obvious? Where is that insertion of original fear when you walk into a room and see a gigantic creature pop out of nowhere and you say to yourself “ holy s***, what is that thing?” but not only that but the excitement of finding out how to kill a boss is left out. In saying all this, I’m not going to deny that these creatures’ attacks were a pain to try and dodge, seeing as how you verse most of them in very tight spots, though somehow I managed to have more trouble killing the more basic units.
Dead space 2’s most elaborate and exciting feature would probably the zero gravity system that they brought in, though it has very similar characteristics to the Zelda: twilight princess swimming system, but somehow the effect of it being in space makes it feel like it’s never been done before. When you are in zero gravity mode you have the ability to go the full 360 degrees which can result in a great deal of fun, flying around at intense speeds, dodging large crushing objects. Though if I could change anything about it, I would insert some more aliens, letting you use the zero gravity in more ways then to dodge things.
The story of the game at first glance would be Isaac fighting back the necromorph alien race, but as you draw closer and closer to the end of the story you realize that it’s actually about Isaac overcoming the sad past of his dead girlfriend. Dead space 2 portrays this in a very surrealist way making her the scariest thing in his eyes and as he accepts her death more and more she becomes more and more like the woman that he remembers. This deep meaning to the game makes the player sympathize with Isaac’s pain and allows you to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing.
Verdict: weighing up all the pro’s and con’s of this game I would have to say that the only conclusion is to buy this game, if you’re a big fan of horror/thriller based games, it gives you great enjoyment for a large amount of time, plus the high level graphics make it that much better to play. The great fight scenes and the deep and moving clips give the story two completely different sides in which allows everyone to appreciate the game.
Rating: 8.5/10
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