Dead Space 2 Review

25 Jan 2011 at 18:27:59 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360)

You know what my favourite part of the first Dead Space was? I loved the death scenes. The fact that every enemy killed you in a unique way was just marvellous; I never tired of seeing our protagonist Isaac Clarke decapitated or torn apart in new and unique ways. Dead Space 2, as you'd expect, has more. More of everything, in fact: more types of Necromorph to dismember, more weapons with which to do the dismembering, more scares, more gore, more locations, and more story.

Dead Space 2 picks up three years after the first game finished. Having escaped the Ishimura, Isaac is picked up and taken to The Sprawl, a gigantic space station built on one of the last remaining shards of one of Saturn's moons, Titan, and it appears that the events of the first game have left their mark on the poor man – he's been having psychiatric counselling of some description. As Isaac Clarke's Adventures in Psychiatry wouldn't be the most interesting game (although I'd play it), once the introduction finishes all hell breaks loose and Isaac is forced to flee a swarm of Necromorphs that have somehow made it aboard the station. While dressed in a straitjacket, just in case it wasn't terrifying enough. It's not long before he gets his hands on an engineering RIG and a plasma cutter, though, and from there we're into familiar territory: following blue lines on the ground, dismembering Necromorphs, reading bloody messages daubed on the walls, and being entirely uncertain as to which of the voices in your ear are trustworthy.

The game is perfectly recognisable as Dead Space. You've got the same over-the-shoulder perspective and the same focus on dismembering your foes, and the art style is classic Dead Space with the familiar RIGs, hologram user interfaces, and bloodied, angular foes. But there are plenty of changes, and the biggest is that Isaac is a character.

Considering the focus on his sanity and the hallucinations he's suffering – this is a rather more personal story, after all – it's not hard to see why Dead Space's silent protagonist was asked to speak up a little. And on the whole, it works: for the most part he's well-written and well-voiced, and it's easy to connect to him as a character. He manages to resist the urge to talk every single waking second, and barring one or two late-game occurrences, avoids spouting action hero cliches, which maintains the tone of the game rather nicely. Will wonders never cease?

And unlike the first game, the plot starts early and continues right the way through. While Dead Space took a good long while before any real semblance of plot kicked in, instead having you wander from deck to deck solving problems, pretty much everywhere that Isaac goes in Dead Space 2 is for a purpose other than “stop everything from blowing up.” In another happy touch, it takes place in locations away from Generic Sci-Fi Corridor #1138 – the Sprawl is a station, not a mining ship, and you'll be fighting your way around shopping promenades, schools, and uniquely creepy churches, in addition to bleak and flickering corridors.

Which is all well and good, but if the combat was naff it wouldn't matter much. For the most part it's fairly familiar territory – Necromorphs come running at you and you hack off their limbs with a variety of ranged engineering tools – but there's plenty of new stuff that changes the way you play. Isaac's Kinesis ability has been upgraded, for instance, and you can now pick up sharp implements or Necromorph limbs and fire them through any still-shambling beasties.

Dead Space 2 also contains what is possibly my new favourite weapon in anything ever: the Javelin Gun. The Javelin Gun's standard fire does what the name implies: it launches huge pieces of sharpened metal at foes, frequently impaling them, while the alt-fire discharges a massive amount of electricity from the last fired bolt, frying the target and anything nearby. In a game about dismemberment it might not sound like the most useful tool in the game, but it has its uses – as does every other weapon in the game. While you'll have a veritable arsenal by the time the credits roll, they're all useful in particular situations and at particular times, but they're never so useful that you'll avoid getting into tight spots.

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