Dead Space is a game in which you play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer, responding to a distress call on a spaceship from his wife. Upon reaching the ship, he quickly finds the reason for the distress call: strange creatures are being created from all the dead bodies on the ship and are attacking everything in sight. It becomes up to Isaac to try to combat the problem and find a way off the ship, fighting off the Necromorphs on every front that arises. However, as things progress, it becomes clear that more is as it seems on the U.S.G Ishimura, and between the many factions vying over the possession of the mysterious Red Marker, the psychological toll of the situation, and the ship itself falling apart at the seams, making it out alive starts to become more and more unlikely…
The core gameplay loop… really works in how simple it is. It plays mostly like your average over-the-shoulder third-person shooter, though with a twist: the Necromorphs don’t play by user shooter rules, but instead must be dismembered limb-from-limb in order to be put down for good. This… is a really neat twist on the shooter gameplay, and it's really fun having to retrain yourself to go for the neck or arms instead of the head. Later enemy types (and weapons, though there are some issues here I’ll get into momentarily) often require different approaches and strategies in order to take down, and it's really cool to have to think on your feet to try and stay alive, especially with how the game really likes to throw hordes at you. In any other game, it’d get frustrating, but here, it’s a challenge you’re always rearing to face, and a really good way of showing how this game blends action with survival horror.
I’d also really like to shout out this game’s aesthetic and just how hard it commits to it. There’s an effort made to make every element of the UI (such as your HP, the map, the shop, etc.) something represented in-game, rather than an element located outside of it, such as a health bar, or a map that pauses the game when opened. This does a lot, both to make the game experience seamless (even with the occasional loading screen in-between chapters) and to immerse the player into the aesthetic they’re presenting of this… mostly rustic future. Like Alien, the future presented is grimy and industrial — with brown and grey being favoured colours — and you can see the working parts and veins of the ship as you walk around, which is a contrast to the sleek, bright spaceships of most science fiction. It’s an art style that… still really holds up today, and really shows just how much aesthetics can contribute to a game’s mood and tone.
There are… issues, though. While the core gameplay of going through the ship and fighting the necromorphs is consistently excellent, a lot of the other gameplay elements… aren’t. Between platformer zero-gravity segments where its hard to know where you’re meant to go or where you’re allowed to jump, boss fights which mostly just consist of walking out the way of easy-to-dodge attacks while waiting forever for the boss to open up its weakpoints, and turret segments which legitimately hurt my arm while I was playing them, I was pretty consistently annoyed whenever I got pulled away from the stuff I liked to do, especially given how these sections invariably ended up worse than whatever I was doing before. I also feel like there was an issue with the amount of ammo I’m given? The way it works is that you (theoretically) only get ammo for the guns you have, which means that if you only have one or two you’re always going to be having ammo for them, while if you have three or four, you’re going to have scarcely any ammo for any of them. This… is a bit rough. It effectively disincentivizes you from using multiple guns, which… in a game where a lot of the core combat requires you to change your approach for each different enemy that arises, not having any reason to use any of the varied and potentially useful weapons against them seems like that front could’ve been expanded even more.
But even then, I really like the core gameplay of this enough to be able to shrug off most of the bad stuff. While there were sections that kind of sucked, the aesthetically pleasing and low-key deep setting/story and the sheer fun in managing resources and dealing with the necromorphs still make it clear that this is a survival horror classic, even today. 8/10.
The core gameplay loop… really works in how simple it is. It plays mostly like your average over-the-shoulder third-person shooter, though with a twist: the Necromorphs don’t play by user shooter rules, but instead must be dismembered limb-from-limb in order to be put down for good. This… is a really neat twist on the shooter gameplay, and it's really fun having to retrain yourself to go for the neck or arms instead of the head. Later enemy types (and weapons, though there are some issues here I’ll get into momentarily) often require different approaches and strategies in order to take down, and it's really cool to have to think on your feet to try and stay alive, especially with how the game really likes to throw hordes at you. In any other game, it’d get frustrating, but here, it’s a challenge you’re always rearing to face, and a really good way of showing how this game blends action with survival horror.
I’d also really like to shout out this game’s aesthetic and just how hard it commits to it. There’s an effort made to make every element of the UI (such as your HP, the map, the shop, etc.) something represented in-game, rather than an element located outside of it, such as a health bar, or a map that pauses the game when opened. This does a lot, both to make the game experience seamless (even with the occasional loading screen in-between chapters) and to immerse the player into the aesthetic they’re presenting of this… mostly rustic future. Like Alien, the future presented is grimy and industrial — with brown and grey being favoured colours — and you can see the working parts and veins of the ship as you walk around, which is a contrast to the sleek, bright spaceships of most science fiction. It’s an art style that… still really holds up today, and really shows just how much aesthetics can contribute to a game’s mood and tone.
There are… issues, though. While the core gameplay of going through the ship and fighting the necromorphs is consistently excellent, a lot of the other gameplay elements… aren’t. Between platformer zero-gravity segments where its hard to know where you’re meant to go or where you’re allowed to jump, boss fights which mostly just consist of walking out the way of easy-to-dodge attacks while waiting forever for the boss to open up its weakpoints, and turret segments which legitimately hurt my arm while I was playing them, I was pretty consistently annoyed whenever I got pulled away from the stuff I liked to do, especially given how these sections invariably ended up worse than whatever I was doing before. I also feel like there was an issue with the amount of ammo I’m given? The way it works is that you (theoretically) only get ammo for the guns you have, which means that if you only have one or two you’re always going to be having ammo for them, while if you have three or four, you’re going to have scarcely any ammo for any of them. This… is a bit rough. It effectively disincentivizes you from using multiple guns, which… in a game where a lot of the core combat requires you to change your approach for each different enemy that arises, not having any reason to use any of the varied and potentially useful weapons against them seems like that front could’ve been expanded even more.
But even then, I really like the core gameplay of this enough to be able to shrug off most of the bad stuff. While there were sections that kind of sucked, the aesthetically pleasing and low-key deep setting/story and the sheer fun in managing resources and dealing with the necromorphs still make it clear that this is a survival horror classic, even today. 8/10.