I remembered it being good, but not this good.
What an incredible title! Three years were all it took for Visceral to internalize their understanding of what Dead Space was and apply it to a new release, and it results in a game that looks like it should be at least a console generation above what it is and plays like it's trying to show off to big-brother Resident Evil 4 instead of just imitating. From top to bottom, Dead Space 2 is a clear and serious evolution of everything that came before it, and it remains one of the most impressive showcases of how to make a sequel I've ever seen.
I’d be remiss to imply that much about Dead Space 2 is subtle, but there’s an outstanding atmosphere here. The game is a lot more restrained than the previous title in the moment-to-moment action, but it gets a little antsy and has to have a big, explosive set piece every half hour or else it’ll have a heart attack and die. There are a lot of quiet moments; fewer instances where the entire orchestra makes their instruments shriek while a monster stands stark still in broad daylight and waits for you to line up a shot. You get flanked way more often, with most of the necromorphs not making so much as a sound while they creep up behind you. Everything about the Stalkers is so solid that I’m going to give them their own paragraph later. One hallway — filled with little fleshy landmines that you need to slowly and carefully dispatch — starts silently spawning in Slashers directly at your back. Another sequence hangs Isaac by his ankles and forces him to dispatch approaching necromorphs two years before The Last of Us ripped the entire setpiece the fuck off. It’s good! It’s really good! Of course, the Dumb Couch Guy sequences of fighting off gunships or doing a HALO jump hundreds of meters through a glass roof and being fine after the landing are widely seen as being too big and too goofy, but I’m a dumb office chair guy. This is my hole. It was made for me.
There have been a lot of complaints about how Dead Space 2 action-ized the series and stripped it of too much of the horror, but I’m on the record as saying that Dead Space was never really scary to begin with. I don’t think that dropping some of the pretense is a terrible idea, but maintaining horror elements is crucial to maintaining the identity of the series. Fortunately, I think Visceral struck a phenomenal balance here; the mechanics of the gameplay have been tweaked to make everything a little bit more difficult to sleepwalk through and a little more tense, all the while being immensely fun to play. The plasma cutter earned a (rightful) nerf, and the other guns have been made considerably stronger than they were in order to compensate.
You’ve actually got a reason to use anything other than your default starting pistol now, and it works wonders for experimenting and finding the best tools for the job. Weak enemies like the Pack and Crawlers which can be dispatched in one or two shots call for something you can spray, like the pulse rifle or the flamethrower; tougher foes that stack up in a swarm can be dispatched with the line gun or the ripper; Stalkers that flank and rush you will sprint straight into detonator mines and gib themselves before they can reach you. I’m a massive fan of games with enemy designs and arsenals like this which are never prescriptive. There are solutions which are better than others, but there are no wrong answers. The comparison I like to make is between Doom (1993) and Doom Eternal; the only thing stopping you from beating a Cacodemon to death with just your fists in the original is player skill, while the Spirits in Eternal require you to kill them with a single attachment on a single gun because it’s a reference to Ghostbusters. I digress. Point is, you’ve got a lot of tools, and it’s up to the player to determine which one you should use in a given fight. Some are more efficient for dispatching certain enemies, but pressure factors like ammo counts, reload timing, or inopportune enemy spawns can justify forgoing efficiency for survival.
This has some of the best sound design I’ve heard in anything, full stop. My god, the sound that the pulse rifle makes when you reload it! I stopped playing for a solid minute just to listen to the ticking of the seeker rifle when you zoom it in. The plasma cutter's bolts now hiss when searing a necromorph's flesh. Monster gurgles and shrieks and groans are balanced to sound perpetually in your ears, lurking behind you or tucked around corners. Exploder screams are specifically, uniquely balanced to be exempt from the directional audio; it's impossible to tell where they are, just that they are. It begs to be experienced. I cannot feasibly get enough of this soundscape.
And holy shit, the Stalkers. I love fighting these things. You could have made an entire game where they're constantly hunting you down and it would have worked completely fine. The high of baiting one into a charge while its friends taunt you and then blowing off all of the attacker's limbs is ridiculous. I am a fucking surgeon with the seeker rifle. I have mastered the art of two-shotting even the fastest Stalker and whipping around with enough speed and precision to get the one flanking me, too. They're smart. The raptors from Jurassic Park were a clear inspiration, and Visceral completely nailed it. Unlike the other enemies, their AI seems too particular to work on any old map, so the Stalkers get their own unique rooms with plenty of sight lines and side routes to disorient and distract you. They rule. I love them so much.
If you recall me saying a few days ago that graphics didn’t need to be better than they were in Dead Space, it’s clear that someone at EA/Visceral disagreed. This shit is decadent. This is like converting truffles into game visuals. You've got these dark, moody sections lit only by emergency light and candles; cold, sterile specimen tubes with sky-blue artificial lights catching the rolling layers of fog; the entire Church of Unitology is as beautiful as it sounds, contrasting its drab steel service corridors against massive rooms of worship and sacrifice adorned with stained glass and Marker-pattern greebling. This game is gorgeous. I can't remember the last time I've seen art direction this strong.
And the story is...less great, unsurprisingly. Again, it’s not like it was outstanding in the first game, so I wasn’t expecting much, but that doesn’t save it from being silly. You couldn’t pretend to call this a sensitive portrayal of mental illness; Stross starts off as a decently-written and sympathetic character who’s been treated like a lab rat for so long that it’s warped him into a nervous, guilt-ridden wreck, but he just turns into a giggling, Joker-like maniac who stabs people’s eyes out with screwdrivers by the end. Isaac is now confirmed to suffer from “Marker dementia”, which is a phrase so inherently funny that I couldn’t believe it was the wording that they settled on. Marker psychosis is probably the terminology Visceral were fishing for. I lost my shit laughing the first time I saw the lady in the nursery get blown up by an exploding baby, and I think I was meant to be horrified. Oh, and the Marker puts blueprints in your brain if you’re smart and just makes you go cuckoo if you don’t have an engineering degree. It’s schlock. You can’t really ignore it, either, because there are a heavy amount of walk-and-talk sections. I ultimately didn’t care, since I was kind of enjoying the inherent goofiness of everything that was going on, but I really can’t blame anyone for not being able to look past it.
Back when I reviewed the remake of Resident Evil 2, I said that sometimes you just have to give a game a respectable five stars when it's done nothing wrong by the time the credits roll. You can easily apply this philosophy to something like Tetris, or Super Mario Bros.. If there are no obvious faults, why knock points off? I don't have some catchy term for this subgroup, but they're what I believe most people would largely consider to be understandable and non-controversial "perfect" games.
Dead Space 2 is not one of them.
It's flawed. I can't pretend that it isn't. What it is, however, is a game with problems that have never once detracted from my holistic experience at all. I love this game. I played it when I was 13, and I'm playing it now at 25, and I appreciate it today more than I did when I was younger. Hopefully this pattern keeps and I can put this in my top five of all time once I hit 37.
My mom didn't actually hate Dead Space 2.
What an incredible title! Three years were all it took for Visceral to internalize their understanding of what Dead Space was and apply it to a new release, and it results in a game that looks like it should be at least a console generation above what it is and plays like it's trying to show off to big-brother Resident Evil 4 instead of just imitating. From top to bottom, Dead Space 2 is a clear and serious evolution of everything that came before it, and it remains one of the most impressive showcases of how to make a sequel I've ever seen.
I’d be remiss to imply that much about Dead Space 2 is subtle, but there’s an outstanding atmosphere here. The game is a lot more restrained than the previous title in the moment-to-moment action, but it gets a little antsy and has to have a big, explosive set piece every half hour or else it’ll have a heart attack and die. There are a lot of quiet moments; fewer instances where the entire orchestra makes their instruments shriek while a monster stands stark still in broad daylight and waits for you to line up a shot. You get flanked way more often, with most of the necromorphs not making so much as a sound while they creep up behind you. Everything about the Stalkers is so solid that I’m going to give them their own paragraph later. One hallway — filled with little fleshy landmines that you need to slowly and carefully dispatch — starts silently spawning in Slashers directly at your back. Another sequence hangs Isaac by his ankles and forces him to dispatch approaching necromorphs two years before The Last of Us ripped the entire setpiece the fuck off. It’s good! It’s really good! Of course, the Dumb Couch Guy sequences of fighting off gunships or doing a HALO jump hundreds of meters through a glass roof and being fine after the landing are widely seen as being too big and too goofy, but I’m a dumb office chair guy. This is my hole. It was made for me.
There have been a lot of complaints about how Dead Space 2 action-ized the series and stripped it of too much of the horror, but I’m on the record as saying that Dead Space was never really scary to begin with. I don’t think that dropping some of the pretense is a terrible idea, but maintaining horror elements is crucial to maintaining the identity of the series. Fortunately, I think Visceral struck a phenomenal balance here; the mechanics of the gameplay have been tweaked to make everything a little bit more difficult to sleepwalk through and a little more tense, all the while being immensely fun to play. The plasma cutter earned a (rightful) nerf, and the other guns have been made considerably stronger than they were in order to compensate.
You’ve actually got a reason to use anything other than your default starting pistol now, and it works wonders for experimenting and finding the best tools for the job. Weak enemies like the Pack and Crawlers which can be dispatched in one or two shots call for something you can spray, like the pulse rifle or the flamethrower; tougher foes that stack up in a swarm can be dispatched with the line gun or the ripper; Stalkers that flank and rush you will sprint straight into detonator mines and gib themselves before they can reach you. I’m a massive fan of games with enemy designs and arsenals like this which are never prescriptive. There are solutions which are better than others, but there are no wrong answers. The comparison I like to make is between Doom (1993) and Doom Eternal; the only thing stopping you from beating a Cacodemon to death with just your fists in the original is player skill, while the Spirits in Eternal require you to kill them with a single attachment on a single gun because it’s a reference to Ghostbusters. I digress. Point is, you’ve got a lot of tools, and it’s up to the player to determine which one you should use in a given fight. Some are more efficient for dispatching certain enemies, but pressure factors like ammo counts, reload timing, or inopportune enemy spawns can justify forgoing efficiency for survival.
This has some of the best sound design I’ve heard in anything, full stop. My god, the sound that the pulse rifle makes when you reload it! I stopped playing for a solid minute just to listen to the ticking of the seeker rifle when you zoom it in. The plasma cutter's bolts now hiss when searing a necromorph's flesh. Monster gurgles and shrieks and groans are balanced to sound perpetually in your ears, lurking behind you or tucked around corners. Exploder screams are specifically, uniquely balanced to be exempt from the directional audio; it's impossible to tell where they are, just that they are. It begs to be experienced. I cannot feasibly get enough of this soundscape.
And holy shit, the Stalkers. I love fighting these things. You could have made an entire game where they're constantly hunting you down and it would have worked completely fine. The high of baiting one into a charge while its friends taunt you and then blowing off all of the attacker's limbs is ridiculous. I am a fucking surgeon with the seeker rifle. I have mastered the art of two-shotting even the fastest Stalker and whipping around with enough speed and precision to get the one flanking me, too. They're smart. The raptors from Jurassic Park were a clear inspiration, and Visceral completely nailed it. Unlike the other enemies, their AI seems too particular to work on any old map, so the Stalkers get their own unique rooms with plenty of sight lines and side routes to disorient and distract you. They rule. I love them so much.
If you recall me saying a few days ago that graphics didn’t need to be better than they were in Dead Space, it’s clear that someone at EA/Visceral disagreed. This shit is decadent. This is like converting truffles into game visuals. You've got these dark, moody sections lit only by emergency light and candles; cold, sterile specimen tubes with sky-blue artificial lights catching the rolling layers of fog; the entire Church of Unitology is as beautiful as it sounds, contrasting its drab steel service corridors against massive rooms of worship and sacrifice adorned with stained glass and Marker-pattern greebling. This game is gorgeous. I can't remember the last time I've seen art direction this strong.
And the story is...less great, unsurprisingly. Again, it’s not like it was outstanding in the first game, so I wasn’t expecting much, but that doesn’t save it from being silly. You couldn’t pretend to call this a sensitive portrayal of mental illness; Stross starts off as a decently-written and sympathetic character who’s been treated like a lab rat for so long that it’s warped him into a nervous, guilt-ridden wreck, but he just turns into a giggling, Joker-like maniac who stabs people’s eyes out with screwdrivers by the end. Isaac is now confirmed to suffer from “Marker dementia”, which is a phrase so inherently funny that I couldn’t believe it was the wording that they settled on. Marker psychosis is probably the terminology Visceral were fishing for. I lost my shit laughing the first time I saw the lady in the nursery get blown up by an exploding baby, and I think I was meant to be horrified. Oh, and the Marker puts blueprints in your brain if you’re smart and just makes you go cuckoo if you don’t have an engineering degree. It’s schlock. You can’t really ignore it, either, because there are a heavy amount of walk-and-talk sections. I ultimately didn’t care, since I was kind of enjoying the inherent goofiness of everything that was going on, but I really can’t blame anyone for not being able to look past it.
Back when I reviewed the remake of Resident Evil 2, I said that sometimes you just have to give a game a respectable five stars when it's done nothing wrong by the time the credits roll. You can easily apply this philosophy to something like Tetris, or Super Mario Bros.. If there are no obvious faults, why knock points off? I don't have some catchy term for this subgroup, but they're what I believe most people would largely consider to be understandable and non-controversial "perfect" games.
Dead Space 2 is not one of them.
It's flawed. I can't pretend that it isn't. What it is, however, is a game with problems that have never once detracted from my holistic experience at all. I love this game. I played it when I was 13, and I'm playing it now at 25, and I appreciate it today more than I did when I was younger. Hopefully this pattern keeps and I can put this in my top five of all time once I hit 37.
My mom didn't actually hate Dead Space 2.
Robot_Rock
8 months ago