The Dead Space Franchise...

I’ve been playing and catching up on a lot of games recently, some of them being Metro : Last Light, Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3 and the latest one being Dead Space 3. I know Dead Space 3 had been out for quite a while now already, but the main reason I’ve been holding out of it is I wanted nice and calm games to play, you know, not a game that keeps you on your toes throughout the whole game. Yeah, call me a scaredy-cat or stuff like that, but that has always been the thing with all 3 Dead Space games. I had just recently played through the 3^rd game, not sure if I would like to finish it. I have a reason for that, hear me out. If there’s 1 thing I find so dominant in all 3 games, its “Isaac do this”, “Isaac do that” and while I do understand it’s for the good of all the people, or in the first game, mostly you since all of your team die in the end (spoiler alert, but you guys must have played the first one already…) and in the second game it’s to have you and your girlfriend (or girlfriend to be later on) escape while destroying the marker, but at the very least, a little help would be nice (though that would defeat the whole purpose of a survival horror game).

(Above) Yup, it says right there on the top left, Dead Space...

I’m not proud of it, and don’t judge me for it, but the Dead Space franchise are one of the few games that I play on the lowest difficult. Yeah, laugh at me, but with the game making me all tense and stuff, I wouldn’t want the lack of ammunition or med kits to add to that tension. Which is also my next point being that you can barely do anything without ammo. In other games, like Metro : Last Light, you can survive without ammo, although barely, or in Bioshock Infinite, you have your trusty melee weapon if ammo gets low, as well as the fact that Elizabeth will throw you stuff when you need it. In Dead Space, if you run out of ammo, good luck going through those corridors and pathways without taking out the Necromorphs and just running to the next location. It also helps less that there are locations or areas which you have to go through in the game that require you to take out all the enemies. Yeah, good luck with that, without ammo, stomp em’ right? Wrong, you would die simple as that, and you’d have to play a few stages back just you stock up properly so that the same thing would not happen again.

(Above) You start off in the first game, kind of like this, lousy armour, I mean nothing "wrong" could happen in a ship sending a warning beacon out, right? And also the fact that you're not greeted by any of the crew in the beginning is not at all "suspicious".

Let’s just say this is not the game to play on your first run through in the hardest difficulty, no matter how good you are at shooters, because it will punish you, severely.

(Above) Hahaha! No bullets, no AMMO, then you have THAT, ahahahaha!!

(Above) THAT and your "overly-attached" (she's dead and still doesn't stop talking to you, that counts, right?) girlfriend!

However, I enjoyed (yeah… how do you enjoy something that scares you and keeps you tense throughout the whole thing… hmmm…) the first 2 games, some of the best games I had played for this genre, but the third game seems to differ a lot from the other two. While some of the changes are welcome, the third has a different, hmmm, feel to it. Though the enemies’ limbs do take more shots to amputate (yeap, one of the main strategies of this game if you don’t know is strategic amputation), and the rapid firing weapon given as a preset weapon is useless, it doesn’t make the game more terrifying than the first two. The complete change of environment is not something which I liked too much, and this might be the reason for it being less “scary”.

(Above) Yeah, most of my cousins stopped playing after this part, apparently not having a weapon is scary, hahahaha, yeah....

Now it might seem that I completely hate the franchise, I don’t, here are some plus points for these three games.  It was one of the best games of that genre, it really is that scary. The weapon customization, puzzles were also something quite new to this genre of games. And when I say puzzles, they’re not the kind like find the code of stuff like that. Nope, here’s the situation, we make an enemy go after you, you can’t kill him, good luck, oh yeah, there’s this liquid nitrogen thing. And it’s stuff like that which will make your heart pump and try to escape while holding that “enemy” off. And this is also present in the other two sequels. While the puzzles are easy, in the sense of figuring out, they are not too easy in the sense of execution. But one of the best points in game is the overall experience is, it is scary, and being a survival horror game, that’s the important part. The gameplay is smooth, if not, it’s hard enough already (while you can’t jump in the game, you don’t really need to). 

(Above) When you enter a ship, and you see this, what do you do? Well, according to this game, JUST WALK IN! And the crew are ever so concerned about you that all of them, yes, you heard me, ALL of them come to you and give you a warm welcome!

(Above) "Oh, the welcoming community!"

For the third game the weapon customisation and the fact that all the weapons share the same type of ammunition would be a big plus point. Plus you could have 2 weapons in 1 which make switching out weapons less of pain (even more when a horde of these monsters charge at you). But 1 thing I did not enjoy is that the 2 integrated weapons share the same cool down. For example, I like having a machinegun on top with a shotgun on the bottom, weak rapid fire top, powerful slow fire bottom. But once I fire the bottom weapon, it’s a noticeably long wait before being able to fire the top rapid fire weapon.

(Above) The crafting looks something like that, its much easier than you think, but upgrading the weapons are now more limited.

(Above) Though in the first game the suit doesn't look that cool, the sequels' available suits look much more promising!

To give my personal reason why I started out playing Dead Space, at first it was the cool suit your engineer Isaac would be wearing. I know, pretty dumb reason, but it was something that pulled me into playing the game. However, after playing a little, it was just, fun in a way. And that is all, if you like jump scares and horror games, consider Dead Space, it’s a shooter, and one of the best of its kind.

Farid