EA at last becomes to Dead Space what vultures are to carrion.

Christ, this is it. It's so fucking over that it's hard to believe it even began. I hope Backloggd starts de-weighting my account after I post this for swinging directly from the highest score you can give a game to the lowest in the span of two reviews. But it's not like I can justify giving Dead Space 3 a single sliver of a star more than this. Man. I have lived long enough to see another thing I love get the meat flayed from its bones and then sold back to me as though it were what I originally enjoyed. The (appropriate!) shambling corpse of a game that's here is barely holding itself together through its own atrocious design, an onslaught of bugs, and corporate meddling so heavy that you can taste the copper of the pennies they wrung out of it. It's a game at war with itself, being pulled in two irreconcilable directions by its creators and its publisher; divorce leads children to the worst places.

The animated-chicken-nugget-fication of Dead Space. A Bosch-like nightmare scape not textually but meta-textually. Microtransaction-reliant crafting resource collector drones returning +1 Damage +1 Reload microchips under the implication that those stats have meaning beyond providing the knowledge that, somewhere, numbers are increasing. The end stage of cynical market-tested brand awareness, acting purely as a terminal diagnosis for 80 careers. Advertising strategy dependent purely on guilting the consumer for not consuming enough and dangling culpability for securing the livelihoods of Visceral employees over the heads of people like me foolish enough to buy.

Dead Space 3 abjectly fails from the outset with its new mechanical overhauls, ensuring that you're only ever using a single crafted gun for the entire duration of the game and stripping you of the veritable arsenals that prior games provided. There's no point in doing anything besides stacking as many upgrades as you can fit onto a single weapon; you can freely respec the stat boosting chips around without penalty and ammunition is now universal. Alt-fires are completely gone, replaced with a crafting bench Frankenstein-ing of two primary fires together, meaning that any gun whose main function isn't "spray bullets" is inherently worthless. The damage boost for shooting limbs has been reduced to negligible amounts, so bodyshots become king. Not like it matters, since firing into the torso just happens to make the limbs fall off regardless, dismemberment now acting as a visual indicator of overall damage rather than as a reward for well-placed shots. Any pretense of balance goes out the window the second you unlock the Chain Gun and its 3,000 round reserves, and said balance is then buried six feet beneath wet mud once you unlock an attachment that coats your fucking bullets in Stasis. You now have a portable, 150-bullet-per-magazine slow motion gun that shreds whatever you point it at and never runs out of ammo. You are never in any danger for the rest of the game unless you fail one of the many, many QTEs that keep getting thrown at you and result in an instant kill if you don't mash fast enough.

There's a little foible with the universal ammo mechanic wherein a singular "ammo clip" secretly provides a percentage of the magazine size in usable ammunition. Naturally, I started applying as many +3 Clip upgrades to my Chain Gun as I could fit, and packed my twenty-five slot inventory with all the 20-stacks of ammo that I had. Equipping my gun revealed the truth that any pretense of survival horror had been dropped; I can carry on my person a theoretical maximum of 24,600 bullets — 49.2 shots per ammo clip. Enemies drop five fucking ammo clips at a time when you kill them. Two hundred and forty-six free bullets as a common pickup dropped by necromorphs and humans who regularly die in about twenty shots tops. There exists no reality where you could ever run out of supplies. Even if you do, the new microtransaction drone that collects crafting materials will always stop by your bench with plenty of raw resources that you can refine into more ammo clips and full heals. If your gun ever clicks empty, I'd guess you were actively trying to run out of bullets. I spent a magazine into a wall just to illustrate to a friend the fact that I got an attachment that automatically reloaded my gun for me, and I didn't even notice the ammo loss. You have an arbitrarily large amount of bullets. It's fucking stupid.

Speaking of fucking stupid, the story here has somehow gotten worse than in Dead Space 2, which is honestly one of the most impressive things about Dead Space 3. In the previous game, it was rough. I won't make apologies for it. What I will say is that it wasn't distractingly bad.

Ellie as a character has been twisted from a decently-written action girl who can take care of herself and refuses to let Isaac do things alone into helpless eye-candy whose only role is to cry and be one of three points in a love triangle. I cannot overstate the disservice they've done to her here. She's acting like she's never seen a person die before, weeping and screaming that she can't bear to go on after losing a couple of crewmates; the very last game had her say that she had to kill her own squad when they turned into necromorphs, and while she's clearly broken up over it, she manages to hold herself together past the end of the game. Here, she's written to be nothing more than an object that needs to be protected by Isaac, completely incapable of handling herself — the narrative equivalent of Baby Mario. Isaac himself similarly exists to both scream "Ellie" and quietly seethe over the fact that she's got a new jock boyfriend. The entire subplot hardly matters anyway, because the guy gets unceremoniously shot in the head to turn the love triangle into a vector and give Isaac the girl by default. Ellie barely even mourns the guy for more than ten minutes (incredibly uncharacteristically for her in this game, since every death prior to and after this makes her have a breakdown) before she's completely over it and confessing her undying adoration for Isaac.

The actual plot beats are the worst they've ever been. A man who is very clearly Elton John operating under the pseudonym of Danik has taken charge of Unitology — all of it, I suppose — and has made them go full mask-off death cult. The Unitologists now wear balaclavas with skulls painted on them like they're fucking Ghost from Modern Warfare and blow themselves up with Looney Tunes sticks of dynamite. Since escaping from the mental ward in Dead Space 2, Isaac has now somehow gained a reputation for himself as "The Marker Killer" (a title which he boasts about) and gets kidnapped/forcibly enlisted into a space military squad to go kill the Very Final Marker somewhere off in deep space. Shit goes awry, another ancient alien race built technology to make everything on a planet snowy to freeze the necromorphs, everyone on the snowy planet dies, Danik drops Facts And Logic on our protagonists, the moon is actually made out of necromorphs, a lot of moons are made out of necromorphs, the sentient necromorph moons fly to Earth and kill everyone and the game ends. Sprinkle in some daytime television romantic tension and mix it with Gears of War angry jarhead shouting matches and you've got a recipe for something that sucks ass and manages to be completely forgettable.

There are two sequences where Carver, the new co-op partner and resident boot-boy dipshit succumbs to his own flavor of Marker dementia and starts seeing things that aren't there. Since the Markers are now portable Silent Hill 2s and can only truly be beaten by overcoming your guilt rather than eldritch artifacts that make necromorphs, he sees visions of his dead family. Something happened that caused him to abandon them, they got turned into necromorphs, and then he killed them. Theoretically sad, but we've seen this exact same setup in countless bits of zombie fiction before this. How does the game decide to get all Carver's grief and anguish and consuming guilt across? With massive birthday party banners that read "DADDY HATES ME" and "DEAD INSIDE". Christ. Carver goes into his mind palace and guns down a bunch of shadow children for long enough to get over his dementia and it's never brought up again for the rest of the game. Okay. Sure.

This is an ugly game, and I mean that beyond just its narrative. The striking visual direction found in the first two games — horror in the sterile gunmetal corridors of the first and the gorgeous dynamic multi-colored lighting of the second — has essentially been excised. What we're left with looks like a collection of Mortal Kombat stage backgrounds at their best and a very early Xbox 360 title at their worst. Everything is so washed out and foggy, as though the render distance has been cranked down to five feet in front of Isaac's face. Dead Space came out six years prior to this and it looks significantly better with regards to both art direction and technical fidelity. There's seemingly no part of this game that you couldn't call a downgrade.

I hate Dead Space 3. It completely fails at everything that it sets out to do. It's heartbreaking to see the leap in quality between Dead Space and Dead Space 2, and then to watch how impossibly far the series manages to fall by the time it closes out the trilogy. If this was the trajectory that it was set to take from this point on, I'm relived that the series is now dead and buried. Sometimes letting go hurts less than clinging on to a miserable misfire.

The DLC warned me after I bought it that it wasn't going to be covered by EA's Great Game Guarantee, and that's honestly funnier than anything I could have hoped to write myself.