'Dead Space 2' Review

    After playing the first Dead Space, I have to say, I was really looking forward to this next installment. Visceral did a really good job of making a new world for this one, and the story is phenomenal. Albeit a story with very common mistakes, but without those mistakes there would be no plot. Mistakes like building another Marker. Did you not learn from the first time around! Anyway, here's what I think:

I can has cool helmet?

     Story: The story starts out... Oh, SPOILER ALERT! Alright then. The story starts out with Isaac in the mental ward on Titan Station. Yes, the mental ward, as in the hospital. A zombie game (technically) that starts out in a hospital. Fantastic. You are shaken awake by Expendable #1, who briefly tells you nothing of importance and then is promptly zombiefied. Now that you're awake you have to run. Did I mention the straight jacket? Yeah, you're in a straight jacket and you're running. The first one threw me for a loop by not giving me a weapon at the start. Now this one took it to a whole new level of ridiculousness by forcing me to hug myself constantly while running from monsters trying to nom my brains. You come across some other humans, security officers, who shoot at you. Apparently the administrator has ordered your death. Great. Once through the harrowing tunnels of Necromorphs, you come to a human who, after threatening to slit your throat, gives you a health pack and a flashlight. A flashlight. Wonderful. At least now you can see death coming for you. That's how the game starts. Don't worry, it gets much better.

      Eventually you gain the means to defend yourself, which comes in the form of a medical-grade plasma cutter. HUZZAH! Now you can start pwning some necros. You also find out that you have a "unique" form of dementia, by which you see visions of your dead girlfriend at the most inconvenient of times. As the game goes on, the dementia becomes debilitating, causing Isaac to nearly kill himself. Now you not only have to watch out for necromorphs, but also security, and even yourself trying to kill you.

The visuals are visually stunning...

Now for some major spoilers: (Highlight the blacked-out portion to see...)

    A woman, Diana, contacts you with the intention of helping you survive, and gives you a waypoint to follow. A man, Stross, also contacts you. He was in the mental ward as well, and turns out to not be of much help. You fail many times of course, and have to change routes several times. One route takes you through the Funerary Ward of the Church of Unitology. Yeah, Funerary Ward. On the way you find out that the administrator of the Station, Tiedemann, has created another Marker, which is the reason for the necro outbreak. Your mission is now to destroy said Marker. Anyhoo, you make it to where Diana is only to find that she's a Unitoligist and has no intention of destroying the Marker. Luckily, she's standing right in front of a giant window, and a gunship comes around and blows her away. FWOOSH! Everyone gets sucked out, except for you. You crawl (read: fall violently) through an air duct and land. RRAAAWWWRRR! Giant Necromorph appears! Time for more running!

    After escaping the Giant Necromorph, you find a woman named Ellie. She's skeptical of your ability to protect anything. She leaves you behind, and only after the poo hits the fan does she decide to follow your advice. She finds Stross along the way, who has been getting steadily worse mentally. While trying to survive, Tiedmann is constantly hindering you, from shutting down power to the tram terminal to trying to derail the tram once you've resupplied it with power. At that point you have to go back to the Ishimura (the ship from the first game), and use its gravity tethers to pull the rails back together so the tram can continue. It had been towed back to Titan Station after being found in the cold reaches of space. The real story had been covered up, and an "official" story was fabricated to take its place. This was a very interesting part of the game, and you find yourself on very familiar ground. The first thing you want to do is get out. Once the tethers realign the tram rails, you board an escape pod and shwoop back to the Station. You're now separated from Ellie again, who is growing weary of Stross's mental instability. 

     Eventually Stross snaps, and tries to kill Ellie. He fails. You find Stross, steal his screwdriver, and plant it squarely in his temple. Dead Stross is dead. Now you find Ellie, who's missing an eye thanks to Stross's screwdriver antics. You mount a giant drill and power your way into the Government sector. This is where the Marker is. Ellie finds a gunship, which Isaac hacks into leaving with only her aboard. "I'm the hero here! I'm saving the day, I can't have an innocent woman killed by my heroism!" She leaves, unwillingly, and you continue on to destroying the Marker. You find it, fight your inner demons, and destroy the Marker! But then you sit down, as if to accept your fate. Credits roll... WHAT!? HOW CAN YOU END A GAM- Ellie appears! With the gunship! A little more gameplay in zero gravity and you board the ship. Off you are to live for another day. And the credits roll... then voices. "The Titan Station Marker has been destroyed. Oh, well. The other Markers will have to do the work we require." Oh snap! I smell a Dead Space 3!

    Whew! That was a long one. Hopefully you didn't get burned out reading that, because there's still more to cover in this review! On to the other points!

Trains are supposed to stay ON the rails...

     Gameplay: First off, the controls have been smoothed over. I played the X-box version, so this is where I'm coming from. Some of the controls have been switched, but overall Dead Space 2 uses the same control setup as the first one. The melee attacks have been smoothed out as well, which made it much easier to kill necros by hand (and foot). Again, a normal HUD is non existent, which is one of my favorite features of the Dead Space games. Your telekinesis module has been upgraded as well, allowing you to impale necros with ease. You can even pin necros to the wall using parts from other necros, poles lying around on the floor, and even broom handles. LOL. Here's some more upgrades:

- New Necros: In addition to the original necros, Dead Space 2 adds new zomibles (funny name for zombies... right?) for Isaac to overcome. There are necros who barf "slow-juice" all over you (boomers, I call them), organic mines that blow you up if you get too close, explosive babies, non-human looking necro velociraptors, and big tripod (bipod?) looking things with crazy tongues. One of my favorite new necros (and by favorite I mean "love to hate") are the Pack. These are children who have been zombiefied, and as their name suggests they come in packs. Five and ten at a time. They're not that hard to kill, but they have strength in numbers.

The "Pack"... Distant cousins of the Zerglings.

- Zero-G: Last game, you had to jump from surface to surface in zero-g. This time you actually release the magnetic boots and lift off from the ground. You can freely fly around, which is awesome. Much better than the first one. Several times you are thrown into zero-g, and have to maneuver your way to safety. Those parts were a lot of fun.

Actual zero-g!

- "Stomp Looting": In the first game, the necros would drop loot when they die, be it ammo or credits. This time they don't. In order to relieve them of their loot, you have to hit them again. You can shoot them, but that wastes ammunition. Thus, stomp looting. Running around stomping the living daylights out of corpses is one of the easier ways to get their loot. Another ammo-less way to take their stuff, is to rip their arms off with telekinesis and impale their dead bodies with them. Awesome. Also unlike the first game, you have to explore a lot more in order to find things. If I remember correctly, most of the schematics and whatnot were on the main path in Dead Space. In Dead Space 2 the items are off the beaten path, and some are tricky to find. Exploration is key. As one person put it, "The object indicator tells me to go this way, so I'm going this way (turns in the opposite direction and runs)." 

Power nodes can be considered "Epic Loots".

- Windows: Dead Space 2 allows you to use windows tactically. By blowing out a window behind a bunch of necros you can save loads of ammo. They'll get sucked out into the vacuum of space, leaving you unharmed. Just remember to shoot the emergency lock-down button above the window before you get sucked out as well.

You guys can't breath in space... Right?

- Seamless Chapter Progression: In Dead Space, the chapters would change every time you boarded the tram and traveled to another section of the ship. This was accompanied by a (sometimes long and slow) loading screen. Not so with Dead Space 2. You could be riding an elevator up and *BOOM*, Chapter 2. No loading screen. The only time I remember a loading screen was if I died, and the game reverted to the last checkpoint. It's a nice change, and more games should adopt it. Also, with the Xbox version, the game came on two disks. At first I was intimidated; the only games I know of that used more than one disk were incredibly long games like Final Fantasy. I was also skeptical of how the two-disk system was going to work. When it came time to change disks, I popped the second one in and in a matter of seconds the game was on again. Very seamless.

Umm... This has nothing to do with chapters or disks... And almost everything to do with instant death...

- Weapons: New weapons, which were about as useless as the old ones. I primarily used the plasma cutter and the plasma rifle, just like last time. I find that these can solve pretty much any problem I ran across. I only tried one other weapon for a short while: the javelin gun. It works along the same lines as nailing necros to the wall with telekinesis, but the alternate fire allows you to electrify the last javelin fired. First javelin not kill the necro? *ZZZOORPT* Zap fried necro for dinner.

The first weapon you get is the best in the game... That's a new twist.

- Suits: The new suits were a step in the right direction. Instead of finding one suit and upgrading it constantly, Dead Space 2 includes new suits: the original engineering suit, the security suit, the vintage suit, and the advanced suit. My favorite was the vintage suit, which looked like an (duh) old, used engineering suit. It was thicker, has an air tank sticking out of the back, and looks like it has more armor. When I found the next suit and changed into it, it almost felt like I was naked. Almost... When you beat the game, it allows you to start another with all the stuff you had at the end of the first play through. During this second play through you can find schematics for the elite versions of each suit. These all have the same armor percentage and inventory slots, and so allow the player to decide what they want to look like.

Wait... Is this a scuba suit!? What is this, Bioshock?

- Hacking: Isaac is supposed to be an engineer, and the first game kinda blows over that. They didn't really show Isaac doing anything... well, engineery ("That's not a word!"). Dead Space 2 adds a sort of mini-game where Isaac has to hack into panels. Sometimes they open doors, some reroute power to elevators, and some lower barriers allowing the Pack to maul you in the open. At one point (and I was waiting for this) you have to hack panels while necros are streaming out of the vents. They'll keep coming until you finish the hack. What a pain...

LOLOLOL! HAXORS!

- Dementia: Dead Space finished... You've unlocked your very own special form of Dementia! DEMENTIA GET! Most of the time your dementia manifests as your dead girlfriend from the last game, and sometimes she tries to kill you. This usually sparks a button mashing fest... PRESS A! PRESS A! Sometimes the dementia sparks a memory from the Ishimura, which makes you freak out for a second until you realize it's your brain playing a cruel joke on you... ITS GOT ME! LET ME G- Oh, it was only my insanity.

Yeah... That's my girl!

   They also took out the "asteroids" mini-game and the big boss fights. The asteroids mini-game annoyed me to no end, so... good riddance. The boss fights in the first one seemed kind of... meh. I'm glad they got rid of them for this one. Of course the end was somewhat like a boss fight, so they didn't get rid of them all together. That's alright with me though; it was an interesting battle.

    Atmosphere: The atmosphere of this game is amazing. And by "amazing" I mean "absolutely creepy". You'll be walking along a wonderfully well lit corridor and *POOF* darkness. There are consoles shorting out all over the place, and video screens will burp into life when you pass them. These scared me more than the necromorphs did. The music was also really well done, even when there was none to be heard. There was one part where Isaac enters the Church of Unitology, and as I stood there, I listened. Nothing. Only Isaac's breathing. It was creepy... But not as creepy as the giant necro that dropped into the middle of the room as I made my way through it. I saw it coming though... It was in the trailers.
     There were also a lot of elevators, just like the first game. All throughout the first game I was like, "You know, it would be terrible and awesome if one of those things dropped into the elevator with me." It never happened. I thought the same while playing the second one and, wouldn't you know, it happened. It didn't even scare me; I was actually happy and excited... Then I bashed his body to a gooey pulp.

Oh, um, hi... Are you going to the second floor as well?

    Then came the cinematics. Many times the game would wrest control of Isaac from the player and force him into a cutscene. Many times it was of Isaac watching some poor sap get eaten alive, sometimes it was a cutscene in which Isaac barely escapes getting crushed by a falling train. That was fun. The point is: the creepiness of the game was made by the atmosphere, which is how many horror games sell their story. I also, liked how the atmosphere wasn't just copy/pasted from the last one. Sure there were bland corridors, but there were also living quarters and a church setting that changed it up from the first Dead Space.

It's dark, there's blood everywhere, and... Is that a dismembered body? Oh, I am so getting out of here...

    Multi-player: I fiddled around with the multi-player a bit, but I found that I didn't really like it. Well, I did buy the game for its single player content. I guess the multi-player's not for everyone.

    All in all, I liked it. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything bad to say about it. Visually, the game is beautiful. The graphics are superb, even better than the first Dead Space which was also superb. It was an interesting story, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Because I play a lot of video games and watch a lot of movies I was able to predict what was about to happen, for the most part. Many times I could sense something bad about to happen, and the game would deliver something much worse. Then sometimes I would expect something to happen and... Nothing. Sometimes a little of both. "I don't like that panel... *walks over panel* Hrm, nothing happened... *BOOM* RRAWWR! ACK! Should have been looking at that panel!"

"One or both of you may not survive... and it may or may not be my fault. Just sayin'..."

    The game is incredibly violent and filled with gore, and the language is fouler than the last one, but it was a fun game to play. There were a lot of parts that were fun to do, and not many that were a pain. I wasn't as scared of this one as I was of the last, probably because I played the first one and knew what to expect. But that's how they get you; it doesn't always happen as you expect. Dead Space 2 was far superior to the first one, and I hope they make another. I'll be in line to get it, that's for sure.

     And just for the LULZ, I've decided to add a video from Tobuscus in which he puts lyrics to one of the Dead Space 2 trailers. Enjoy.
 

(Some pictures courtesy of IGN. Others courtesy of teh interwebs.)