Dead Space 2

Okay, lets get a few things out the way here. If you haven’t played Dead Space you really should. That is if you’re remotely interested in survival horror. If by any chance you’re put off by the idea that you might be scraping around for health and moving really slowly with terrible aiming, Dead Space is a little easier on you than most survival games so don’t let that put you off. It is shit your pants scary, though, mostly due to the incredible use of sound in the game. If you haven’t played it this review of the sequel won’t make much sense and neither will the sequel itself really. It’s very much an evolution of the story of Isaac Clarke so go back to the beginning and play the first game then you may return.

Isaac wakes up in The Sprawl, a fully pressurised, urbanised environment on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Three years have passed since the events on the Ishimura and Isaac has no memories but he does have a face and a voice. It could have gone one of three ways. They could have made him hugely charismatic, he could have been a dick or they could make him a bit of a nonentity so that you still retain that sense of it being you in the suit as you move through one horror after another. They’ve plonked for nonentity and I think that has proved to be the right way to go. The balance between Isaac’s inner struggle, the plot, the action and the exploration is absolutely spot on and getting those ingredients in the right quantities was the big challenge with this sequel. You can relax, Visceral Games has pulled it off. The story is meaty and you can just feel a whole load of crazy psychological shit coming before it even happens. Isaac’s mind is a mess of guilt, fear and longing all tied up with his very dead girlfriend. I’m going to steer clear of any details so as not to spoil it for you but you learn more about the necromorphs, the Marker, the religion behind it and of course Isaac Clarke himself.

Isaac wakes up in a hospital and has to make his way through The Sprawl, fighting a newly varied selection of necromorphs along the way. The Left4Dead style enemies fall into the familiar categories of spewing, charging and exploding types. They aren’t particularly original but they do offer some strategy to combat and combining this with the variety of weapons makes sure that fighting the many-limbed monsters never gets boring. The weapons themselves include all the ones you remember and a few extras. You can level them up as you did before, too. They don’t feel very different than in the last game but I think it’s reasonable to say that this was an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” area of Dead Space.

The environment artists must have been utterly horrified when they saw the finished game. The environments are incredibly detailed. Every desk has pens and photos and post-it notes on it. Every nook and cranny of the plethora of new environments is crammed with just what you’d expect to see there from the malls and food courts to the living quarters and a beautiful church filled with gilded gold icons and stained glass windows. Why would they be horrified by their intricate handiwork? Because you can’t see it. Everywhere is close to pitch black most of the time, even with the brightness turned up. The narrow beamed torch attached to your weapon may make things spooky and so forth but it just frustrates to see all this detail in very small pools of light. Darkness is an overused trick for thrills and scares and Dead Space 2 did not need to rely on it so heavily. It has plenty of other scary stuff going for it. The sound is again an absolute triumph, making the hair on the back of your neck stand up and the characters and scenarios do a great job of filling you with dread. There is a multiplayer, which feels a lot like Left4Dead but its interest is going to be niche as it’s overshadowed by the great story mode.

The one thing missing from Dead Space 2 is the surprise and amazement of discovering a completely new game that’s a high quality adventure with great graphics, story and gameplay. Dead Space 2 does not feel new. How could it? To bring you again what you loved from the original and add some new elements to keep you exhilarated is all we could have expected or wished for and Dead Space 2 delivers.