Does horror in space work? We see as EA breaks into it's new franchise with Dead Space.
To me, there is only two major players in the survival horror and that's Resident Evil and Silent Hill (my personal favorite). Each one has it's only angle on the horror; Resident Evil has the zombie flick action with the easy to explain "human experiments" story to it, and Silent Hill has the psychological Japanese horror aspect where it's not 100% explained why but you work it out yourself with the clues laying around.
Where does EA have to go with Dead Space?
Into Space
You play Isaac Clark (named after the respective writers); a engineer who finds himself and his two team members stranded on the space mining ship USG Ishimura after communications failed on the ship and a lone footage of Isaac Clark's girlfriend asking for help. The **** hits the fan you are fighting off some alien DNA that is able to mutate and re-animate dead corpses on the ship.
So dead space hits on the Sci-Fi-Horror experience by going into space and leaving you to defend against some alien/human/zombie hybrid while you try and suss how what the hell want happened on the mining station and try and get off at the same time.
Without giving away the story too much, I found it predictable and obvious in places what was going to happen. I think the writers went for the easy option when developing the story; not as easy as the Resident Evil way of things, but no means is it Silent Hill. I've heard it being compared to Event Horizon by Zero Puncuation's Ben Crowshaw, but I can't say if it does or not as I haven't seen the film, but reading the Wiki article I think Event Horizon does it better.
Zero-Gravity
One thing I found cool about this game that I think a lot of other games with space elements can miss is zero-gravity. While Dead Space isn't all zero-gravity; you are required to head outside and into rooms with zero gravity. This doesn't mean that Isaac can fly about in a traditional sense but it does mean you are given the freedom to go where-ever in a room and clamp on there while you got enemies from a 360 degree angle coming at you. Once you killed the enemies they will fly about along with the items they drop until, if you can, turn the gravity back and and then they fall as they may.
The game-play other than that is nice; you are given a real sense of weight of Isaac as he walks around in his heavy engineering suite. Throwing a punch or doing a stomp you know there is some weight behind him. But oddly, you don't feel slow because of it, it just adds to the game-play.
The weapon mechanics is good too; you assign 1 weapon to one of the 4 direction slots on the D-pad. This allows for a quick switch over and smoother game pacing. If you have played Resident Evil 4 then you can imagine how aiming works, but with the added perk that you can move as well! As with movement, you really feel the weight of these weapons, either walking around or firing them.
Node Your Average Engineer
An interesting addition is the ability to upgrade your weapons by using power nodes. So you're given a starting point on a circuite system on your weapon and you have to connect the power nodes in a given direction. Some of the connection points do nothing, but others will add damage, capacity, reload speed. You can see all the points you can connect to so it's upto you to work out whats the best route to go when upgrading weapons.
Despite all the crap that went on the station, there is also a shop where you can purchase these power nodes as well as ammo, weapons, health packs and armor upgrades. Throughout the game you will come across schematics as well to give to the shop that will then allow you to purchase the new item.
Isaac also has addons as well; stasis pack and the zero-gravity gun. The stasis pack slows down objects and the zero-gravity gun allows you to pick up objects and move things. I found these two a little tacked on in story progression; they are pretty useless and I only upgraded the zero-gravity gun just to grab items when in zero-gravity zones. These features I didn't find impressive, just something to add to puzzle elements which you are normally told by the scenery what to do or it's blaring obvious: i.e. that door is opening and closing too fast, use the stasis to slow it down and run through.
It has to be said also that this game doesn't operate a normal pause screen to sort your inventory out; the game will keep on moving. So you are standing there wondering what do on the map, reading/listening through logs or sorting out the inventory and you are still getting attacked! Everything is real time! There is a pause screen, but this is out of game-play stuff so you can go grab another beverage.
There are points where the game tries to add puzzles, but these fail in that it just ends up telling you what to do on way or another. It's a shame as this is a short game (you could complete it in a weekend following the story) and those elements could have really added to the game as you are sat there trying to figure out a puzzle but keeping that one eye open for a monster that may pop-out.
Dark and Gory
The graphics can't go wrong in this game. The enemy creatures are reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft mythology (there are points where it looks like you are battling Yog-Soggoth) and some you do see and think "oh **** and make Isaac run a mile! The games (very) dark corridors may really annoy some and the fact the only torch you got is on the end of your weapons will annoy more, but it adds to the affect on danger. Yes, these guys should of had other torches on them, but the same time, the story could of worked so Isaacs didn't work as he got the batteries from a Dollarama.
There is no issues with the camera as it's solidly fixed to Isaac's right shoulder. But there have been times I was lost in the zero-gravity and had no clue apart from the path finder Isaac had (pressing on one of the analog sticks showed a line where to go) showing some what an idea, but failed when it hit a wall.
Does Space Thrills Do It?
I really enjoyed this game, but I think the story and narrow game-play held it back a bit. One to play through again but they could of done more for it such as more secrets, better use of the zero-gravity (I did play the basketball game all the way through it has to be said!) and stasis pack. Puzzle elements could have been a hell load better implemented but I loved the no-pause element that was added.
8/10
Give it a go, it may get annoying and you notice some of the flaws in game-play and story, but it does make up for it being a good little romp!