I went into this game knowing it was going to be bad but felt the need to finish off the Dead Space series after enjoying the first two games.
This is a pretty infamous game - even 10+ years after its release. When the Dead Space remake was released last year one of the most frequent reactions from fans was excitement for the rebirth of a great franchise that EA killed with their meddling. I don’t know enough about the economics of the game industry to say whether or not Dead Space would have survived if Visceral had been able to make the Dead Space 3 they wanted to make, but claims about EA ruining this game definitely ring true after playing it.
This is one of the clearest examples of publisher meddling I’ve yet seen with this game completely abandoning much of what made its predecessors good in order to chase trends, court as broad an audience as possible, and find ways to alter mechanics to compliment the addition of microtransactions. For starters, DS3 is a mediocre and mechanically simplistic 3rd person cover shooter from a gameplay standpoint. I’ve seen some people accuse EA and visceral of trying too hard to turn DS into uncharted or gears of war, but if you ask me I wish they had tried harder. Copying the combat from gears of war or even uncharted 1:1 would have made this a significantly more enjoyable game if you can believe it.
DS3 also eliminates pretty much all elements of horror present in the previous games leaving it no scarier than a game like Gears of War. I can imagine these changes probably seemed like a good idea from EA’s perspective. 3rd person cover shooters were very popular at the time and survival horror generally wasn’t (at least not for AAA games). An EA exec also stated before the game released that they believed the first two DS games were too scary to have mass appeal. This attempt to make the game less frightening was also a justification given for introducing co-op to DS3. Pretty much all mechanics surrounding weapons and upgrading were also altered to accommodate microtransactions. Everything functions on a resource crafting system now, and if you don’t have enough resources to build the gun you want, you can of course spend $4.99 to get more. Thankfully the balancing of the game wasn’t tweaked to force the player to buy additional resources - you’ll have more than enough from just playing the game regularly. DS3 also introduces optional loot dungeons as a way to get more resources, which hilariously try their best to convince you they’re actually side quests. These are probably the worst part of the game from a gameplay perspective. They’re bizarrely lengthy and are comprised of generic rooms that are repeated and rearranged ad nauseam. They actually reminded me a lot of the much maligned dungeons in Dragon Age II - another game that EA is frequently accused of ruining by trying to give it broader appeal.
The generic optional dungeons wouldn’t be an issue if the combat that took place within them was actually good, but it unfortunately isn’t. Combat encounters in DS3 are incredibly repetitive and mindless. If you have a decent enough weapon you can just hunker down in a corner and blast away until you clear the room. None of the enemies require that you adopt different strategies or use different weapons, and you don’t even need to aim for enemies limbs anymore - a few good shots to the chest will kill just about any basic enemy. The design of enemy encounters actually encourages players to adopt this sort of strategy. There are a lot of enemies in this game, and they’re all very fast. Even the most basic Slasher will close in on your from across the room in about a second. Because of this, using high dps automatic weapons and spraying wildly at enemies is by far the best and arguably only truly effective combat strategy. I figured this out pretty quickly and judging from what people have said about the game online the same is true for a lot of players. Once you build a half decent automatic rifle with a force gun attachment there’s absolutely no reason to experiment with or try out different weapons. It would be one thing if this objectively optimal weapon design was something most people would only be able to figure out by reading a guide or after a lot of experimentation but the automatic rifle / force gun combination is so obviously overpowered - even just on paper - that most players will end up organically adopting it as their main weapon by the 4th chapter.
The monotony and simplicity of combat was what really killed this game for me. I realized pretty shortly into the game that combat wasn’t going to change or evolve going forward, and after that point I found it incredibly difficult to keep playing. The combat in Dead Space 2 managed to be action packed, strategic, and well balanced, so this shift in combat design for Dead Space 3 is a bit baffling to me. Combat was already very accessible and player friendly in DS2, so why the significant changes? The only reason I can think of is that perhaps the devs were trying to tweak the combat to be more suited for co-op and the use of craft-able weapons but just didn’t do a very good job.
Environments are more of a mixed bag. There are some genuinely cool settings like the alien city and the inside of a giant frozen necromorph, but the rest are very bland and repetitive. The other two major settings are a frozen planet and a ship graveyard in space. Both of these settings could have been very cool but the actual levels are made up of repeating rooms and hallways that are nearly impossible to tell apart. One of the things I praised about the first two DS games was their surprisingly easy to navigate levels. Part of this is due to rooms and hallways being visually distinct and easy to remember. You really don’t need to use the waypoint in either of those games if you don’t want to. The same can’t be said for DS3. It’s incredibly easy to get lost due to the repetitive environments and you’ll be constantly pinging your waypoint while you play.
Story and writing is also a mixed bag. The most satisfying part of the story is the reveal of how the markers work and what purpose they serve. This actually worked really well and felt consistent with the other games. Everything else is pretty bad though. This is one of those pieces of media where almost everything the characters do and say is remarkably, unbelievably stupid. If you turn your brain off it’s mostly fine, but if you spend even a couple seconds trying to interrogate character motivations the entire thing devolves into absolute nonsense. DS3 also introduces a few new characters, the implementation of which is bizarre to say the least. The main villain of the game looks hilariously similar to Elton John, and I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand this design choice. Almost everyone who talks about this game online mentions this, so there’s no way in my mind that the devs didn’t notice the similarity. Another new character - Norton - is cartoonishly annoying and irredeemable, and it clashes significantly with the overall serious tone of the writing in the game. This is one of those rare instances where the writing of a character actively feels condescending towards the audience. He acts like an annoying 12 year old and it sort of feels like he was written this way to make the game more relatable for 12-14 year old boys. Given the hilariously cringe “your mom is going to hate this” ad for Dead Space 2, there’s no doubt in my mind that 13 year old boys were a core demographic this game was trying to appeal to and that EA’s marketing team was pushing for things to be included in the game that would be appealing to them. On a similar note Ellie’s outfit has been changed to a comically low cut t-shirt to compliment the character model’s now massive breasts. Imagining the asshole who pushed for this to make DS3 more appealing to mainstream gamers legitimately fills me with an unhealthy amount of anger. I genuinely have no problem with non-erotic games trying to be titillating IF it’s done well and fits the tone of the game. Neither is the case here. Genuinely baffled by the idea that anyone over the age of 14 could find something as stupid and obvious as Ellie’s new model - essentially just a CGI Hooter’s waitress - legitimately titillating.
Definitely don’t play this. If you’re curious how the story of dead space ends you’re better off reading a wiki or watching a recap video. There is some fun to be had laughing at how strange and ill conceived a lot of the design decisions are, but this enjoyment is drastically outweighed by just how much of a slog this game is to play. Truly had to force myself to finish this one, which is saying a lot given my patience for mediocre games.
This is a pretty infamous game - even 10+ years after its release. When the Dead Space remake was released last year one of the most frequent reactions from fans was excitement for the rebirth of a great franchise that EA killed with their meddling. I don’t know enough about the economics of the game industry to say whether or not Dead Space would have survived if Visceral had been able to make the Dead Space 3 they wanted to make, but claims about EA ruining this game definitely ring true after playing it.
This is one of the clearest examples of publisher meddling I’ve yet seen with this game completely abandoning much of what made its predecessors good in order to chase trends, court as broad an audience as possible, and find ways to alter mechanics to compliment the addition of microtransactions. For starters, DS3 is a mediocre and mechanically simplistic 3rd person cover shooter from a gameplay standpoint. I’ve seen some people accuse EA and visceral of trying too hard to turn DS into uncharted or gears of war, but if you ask me I wish they had tried harder. Copying the combat from gears of war or even uncharted 1:1 would have made this a significantly more enjoyable game if you can believe it.
DS3 also eliminates pretty much all elements of horror present in the previous games leaving it no scarier than a game like Gears of War. I can imagine these changes probably seemed like a good idea from EA’s perspective. 3rd person cover shooters were very popular at the time and survival horror generally wasn’t (at least not for AAA games). An EA exec also stated before the game released that they believed the first two DS games were too scary to have mass appeal. This attempt to make the game less frightening was also a justification given for introducing co-op to DS3. Pretty much all mechanics surrounding weapons and upgrading were also altered to accommodate microtransactions. Everything functions on a resource crafting system now, and if you don’t have enough resources to build the gun you want, you can of course spend $4.99 to get more. Thankfully the balancing of the game wasn’t tweaked to force the player to buy additional resources - you’ll have more than enough from just playing the game regularly. DS3 also introduces optional loot dungeons as a way to get more resources, which hilariously try their best to convince you they’re actually side quests. These are probably the worst part of the game from a gameplay perspective. They’re bizarrely lengthy and are comprised of generic rooms that are repeated and rearranged ad nauseam. They actually reminded me a lot of the much maligned dungeons in Dragon Age II - another game that EA is frequently accused of ruining by trying to give it broader appeal.
The generic optional dungeons wouldn’t be an issue if the combat that took place within them was actually good, but it unfortunately isn’t. Combat encounters in DS3 are incredibly repetitive and mindless. If you have a decent enough weapon you can just hunker down in a corner and blast away until you clear the room. None of the enemies require that you adopt different strategies or use different weapons, and you don’t even need to aim for enemies limbs anymore - a few good shots to the chest will kill just about any basic enemy. The design of enemy encounters actually encourages players to adopt this sort of strategy. There are a lot of enemies in this game, and they’re all very fast. Even the most basic Slasher will close in on your from across the room in about a second. Because of this, using high dps automatic weapons and spraying wildly at enemies is by far the best and arguably only truly effective combat strategy. I figured this out pretty quickly and judging from what people have said about the game online the same is true for a lot of players. Once you build a half decent automatic rifle with a force gun attachment there’s absolutely no reason to experiment with or try out different weapons. It would be one thing if this objectively optimal weapon design was something most people would only be able to figure out by reading a guide or after a lot of experimentation but the automatic rifle / force gun combination is so obviously overpowered - even just on paper - that most players will end up organically adopting it as their main weapon by the 4th chapter.
The monotony and simplicity of combat was what really killed this game for me. I realized pretty shortly into the game that combat wasn’t going to change or evolve going forward, and after that point I found it incredibly difficult to keep playing. The combat in Dead Space 2 managed to be action packed, strategic, and well balanced, so this shift in combat design for Dead Space 3 is a bit baffling to me. Combat was already very accessible and player friendly in DS2, so why the significant changes? The only reason I can think of is that perhaps the devs were trying to tweak the combat to be more suited for co-op and the use of craft-able weapons but just didn’t do a very good job.
Environments are more of a mixed bag. There are some genuinely cool settings like the alien city and the inside of a giant frozen necromorph, but the rest are very bland and repetitive. The other two major settings are a frozen planet and a ship graveyard in space. Both of these settings could have been very cool but the actual levels are made up of repeating rooms and hallways that are nearly impossible to tell apart. One of the things I praised about the first two DS games was their surprisingly easy to navigate levels. Part of this is due to rooms and hallways being visually distinct and easy to remember. You really don’t need to use the waypoint in either of those games if you don’t want to. The same can’t be said for DS3. It’s incredibly easy to get lost due to the repetitive environments and you’ll be constantly pinging your waypoint while you play.
Story and writing is also a mixed bag. The most satisfying part of the story is the reveal of how the markers work and what purpose they serve. This actually worked really well and felt consistent with the other games. Everything else is pretty bad though. This is one of those pieces of media where almost everything the characters do and say is remarkably, unbelievably stupid. If you turn your brain off it’s mostly fine, but if you spend even a couple seconds trying to interrogate character motivations the entire thing devolves into absolute nonsense. DS3 also introduces a few new characters, the implementation of which is bizarre to say the least. The main villain of the game looks hilariously similar to Elton John, and I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand this design choice. Almost everyone who talks about this game online mentions this, so there’s no way in my mind that the devs didn’t notice the similarity. Another new character - Norton - is cartoonishly annoying and irredeemable, and it clashes significantly with the overall serious tone of the writing in the game. This is one of those rare instances where the writing of a character actively feels condescending towards the audience. He acts like an annoying 12 year old and it sort of feels like he was written this way to make the game more relatable for 12-14 year old boys. Given the hilariously cringe “your mom is going to hate this” ad for Dead Space 2, there’s no doubt in my mind that 13 year old boys were a core demographic this game was trying to appeal to and that EA’s marketing team was pushing for things to be included in the game that would be appealing to them. On a similar note Ellie’s outfit has been changed to a comically low cut t-shirt to compliment the character model’s now massive breasts. Imagining the asshole who pushed for this to make DS3 more appealing to mainstream gamers legitimately fills me with an unhealthy amount of anger. I genuinely have no problem with non-erotic games trying to be titillating IF it’s done well and fits the tone of the game. Neither is the case here. Genuinely baffled by the idea that anyone over the age of 14 could find something as stupid and obvious as Ellie’s new model - essentially just a CGI Hooter’s waitress - legitimately titillating.
Definitely don’t play this. If you’re curious how the story of dead space ends you’re better off reading a wiki or watching a recap video. There is some fun to be had laughing at how strange and ill conceived a lot of the design decisions are, but this enjoyment is drastically outweighed by just how much of a slog this game is to play. Truly had to force myself to finish this one, which is saying a lot given my patience for mediocre games.