Dead Space 3 (PS3): Resident Evil 6 Syndrome....

During the time when EA was running those ads "Your Mom Hates This" for Dead Space 2, I was proudly exclaiming how much I loved it by using such phrases as "I wish this game had a liquid form so I can get naked and roll around in a tub of it." I'll let you sit on that image for a few seconds.

Aside from some slight pacing issues, it basically improved on most of the the complaints I had with the original Dead Space. I have always been a huge advocate of this series feel it never got the credit it should. So naturally I was a bit hesitant when I learned Dead Space 3 takes place on icy planet and the game features 2 player co-op. Not exactly thrilled about that, but I love this series too much to not give it the benefit of the doubt.

DEAD SPACE 3:(PS3)

Two months after the events of Dead Space 2, our survivors Isaac Clark and Ellie Langford have fallen into a bit of a tumultuous schism and have broken up. The Unitologists have taken their cultish fervor to military form, going across the galaxy to activate "Markers" and speed up the Necromorph infection to cause convergence and allow them to be reborn after their grizzly murders.

We cut to Isaac looking older, tired, and heartbroken as he replays a answering machine message from Ellie. She tells him he is going to continue the fight against the Necromorphs and Unitologists without his help. After a bit of a fit throwing some pictures on the ground, his room is invaded by two soldiers of EarthGov: Carver (the co-op player) and Cap. Robert Norton (a massive douche). After a less than friendly introduction he is basically escorted at gunpoint to go after Ellie whom these soldiers lost contact with. Begrudgingly, Isaac follows them but before they even make it out the door the Unitologists attack them.

While technically a good guy, Robert is a first class douchebag.

So with this premise, I was accepting an ready to jump in to the fun that is the Dead Space universe. As soon as I take control of the game I follow my marker and meet up with the two pricks and immediately I am swamped by unitologist soldiers firing machine guns at me. But thankfully, it tells me tapping R3 will allow me to crouch, which is pretty handy considering all the cover around like chest high walls or parked cars.

Fuck. You.

It took me less than a matter of seconds of taking control of the game to be so gut wrenchingly disappointed I almost put the game down. Dead Space is a game that was hinged on creepy monsters, dark claustrophobic settings, and scary atmosphere. If I wanted to fucking duck behind cover to pop my head up and shoot at asshole human beings with guns, I could have picked up ALMOST ANY OTHER FUCKING GAME WITH A GUN IN IT. Fuck. 

Grrrrrrrr.......

In my last review I said I wasn't so backwards thinking that games couldn't update or change, but seriously, come the fuck on. Why would you take a very interesting property and try to make feel like every other 3rd person shooter on the market. I know they sell well but we're good on those, we have plenty. I want to play Dead Space.

Thankfully, this mission lasts only really long enough to serve as a tutorial and once I get away from the shitdick soldiers we get ourselves into space, and then Dead Space starts to feel like it should all over again. The controls will be pretty familiar to series regulars as they are virtually unchanged from the previous titles in this series. The only real functional changes that I was able to find is that usually R3 was the guide button to show you which way to go (a feature I love, btw) but now you have to hold it a second because as I mentioned above, it shares with crouch. On the other analog, they have also added in a dodge roll, but to be honest I never really found an enemy where it was useful.

There was another bit of a jarring shock to me is I was only able to carry two weapons this time, another throw back to the 3rd person cover based shooters they are trying to ape. This to me on one hand was kind of disappointing because I don't like it when a game tries to limit me, but on the other hand I played most of Dead Space 1 and 2 with the initial plasma cutter you start the game with. The more you would upgrade that thing, the more of a beast it would become.

The problem is, that brings us to one of Dead Space 3's newer features, fully customizable weapons. In the previous Dead Space's  you would unlock a weapon and then have to add power nodes to increase its clip, rate of fire, power, and so on. In this version you collect various parts and depending on how you add them it creates a new weapon.

This can be incredibly intimidating because the combinations are pretty plentiful. After a few minutes its easy to get frustrated and even worse its hampered by the fact you can only hold 2 guns. there really isn't even a good way to look at all of the weapons you've created to see which are stronger back to back aside from equipping them then unequipping them. It requires going through too many menus. However, the game does have a cool little workshop feature where you can load a save, tinker with your weapons then let in some monsters to see how they play out. I kinda wish I noticed this feature first because my starting cutter really wasn't cutting it (ba dum tsss).

But if you have the ability to make tons of different weapons, then how are you going to sort out ammo for all the different variations of them? Well, this gives us the unfortunate issue of only having one type of ammo. Its dropped virtually all the time, its very cheap to create, and works for everything. So a lot of the tense fear you would get from not having enough ammo is effectively dashed. Seeing 4 necromorphs baring at you and knowing you are on your last 10 shots of your cutter just added to the fear and atmosphere. Now I can pretty much just rapid fire with little fear of ever running out of ammo. 

Something else I noticed early is that necromorphs are WAY harder to kill this time around. That's a good thing too. The seasoned Dead Space player knows the score: knee shot, arm shot, stomp. In the previous two games this was pretty much all you needed to take down virtually everything in the game, so really you had no reason to upgrade your other weapons because the initial plasma cutter was such a necromorph wrecking beast.

Not my video, but thank you RetroKid91 for doing a game play video without Commentary.

Now the baddies have a lot more spring in their step, they have much more sporadic movement, and they a much harder to put down. It didn't take me long to realize I have to bulk my weapons up way more often or I wasn't going to last.  There is a handful of new types of zombie like Necromorphs as well which also add to the challenge, but generally, you know exactly what to do on each type of monster you come across.

I've said before that this series always kind of struggled when it came to the pacing. What I mean by that is never really get around to building tension by letting fear sink it. Its just start, monsters, shooting. Dead Space 3 really makes no attempt to try to pace the game for horror, because much like all the other 3rd person shooters its emulating it'd rather you start shooting at shit right away. And again, that's disappointing to me because survival horror as a genre just seems to be fading to the wayside.

Easy to kill on their own, but if they get you in groups things can get hairy.

I guess that's why the story feels like it matches this frenetic pace. There are only a handful of downtime moments in the game before shit starts to go haywire. A simple briefing on the bridge of your ship results in all the glass on the ship getting destroyed and sucking you into space (which for a spaceship, seems like a massive design oversight) and as you fling into space you have to fly past meteorites and mines to catch up to the cargo box so you can fly it to the ship you were trying to land on. This is just one example and this kinda thing happens at almost every turn. The final sequence of the game to put it simply, goes completely fucking bananas to the point where I can't figure out what the hell is happening or how we even got there.

That being said, this is the game where Issac really comes the most off as a human being. He was basically just a silent protagonist in the first game and could have been a robot for all we care. In the second game they tried to give him more of a face and dialog, but it came off as kind of generic. In this game, we have some back story, some history, some missing information to learn between games. There is some interesting and realistic emotion between the cast and their interactions (except Robert maybe), so from a story telling standpoint, this is probably the best Dead Space has done in this area.

There is one incredibly jarring flaw I've been trying not to get worked up about. As you have probably already heard before the release, one of EA's big moves "for" the player was to introduce micro transactions you find in mobile games. Their logic is if you want to get more supplies and guns and whatever, those players have the option to pay a little bit to get a few more items in the game.

Oh EA, does your generosity know no bounds? EA, you are notorious and roundly hated for your constant cash grabs. I personally hold you guys responsible for the reason I can't pick up a used game and give the online modes a try without having to pay an extra fucking 10 dollars for it, (I mean I never would, but its the principal of the fact).

But you know what? I was willing to let it slide, It didn't affect my ability to play the game at all and for the most part I didn't seem at all hampered by the fact that I was playing the single player and not the multiplayer. I also discovered the glitch that infinitely respawns some of the items you are supposed to purchase. EA said that stuff is there on purpose, and they don't intend to patch it. Alright then, good on you EA. I was able to play through the game start to finish and didn't feel handicapped, and after a while had a pretty good time with it.

But then you guys did make a patch like 3 days later, and I'll be fucking damned if that glitch wasn't the first thing to fucking go. Right after you said you weren't going to remove it. Seriously? Fuck you guys. 

I'll tell you what though, much like Resident Evil 6 before it I had a laundry list of complaints about this game when I picked it up... But then a few levels into the game they became something I just shrugged off. Not much longer after that I didn't even notice it anymore. Then I managed to beat the game and did something I very very rarely do: I kept playing.

Set the game to hard mode, modded some new weapons, went to New Game+ and played the game almost completely through again. In today's 6 hour video game world we live in, where new triple-A releases come out on a weekly bases, this almost never happens. I crank out a story and them bam, off to the next game. So despite all my bitching, I still managed to get more than 60 dollars worth of entertainment out of a game I did nothing but complain about my first time through.

So again like Resident Evil 6,  I find myself at a bit of a loss for if I recommend the game or not. So I guess the way to go about it is like this: Is Dead Space 3 fun? Yes. Does Dead Space 3 have a great story? Yes. Does the game feel like it belongs with the series? ehhhh, that's where it gets grey to me.

As I said earlier, I bought this game because I wanted to play Dead Space. This is a game that hinged its first two games on ambiance, loneliness,  fear, and excessive gore. The game manages to draw an immense fear in you because for two games it sets the pace that you are completely alone and every single dead body has the potential to rip you limb from limb if you don't see it in time. And one of the big aspects I liked about is, you couldn't headshot things. Lots of crazy different enemies and different weaknesses on a lot of them.

Dead Space 3 didn't feel like Dead Space to me, at least not the whole time. It launched me right into a segment where I have to duck behind cover, and shoot at people holding guns. That's Uncharted, that's Gears of War, that's Mass Effect 3(another example of this), that is NOT Dead Space.  Its infuriating to become invested in something, grow a passion for it, love it, advocate it, then have that love betrayed because it wants to be something else because it sells better. 

The game I love is in here somewhere. As I play through level there are a large number of segments that feel exactly like how this game should be. But then every so often I'll reach this open area with a bunch of containers strewn about that are about chest high and I groan loudly. They don't need to be there. They shouldn't be there.

But ultimately, yes Dead Space 3 is a good game and fun to play. It plays enough like it should to satisfy me as a gamer, but I can't help but feel a twinge of disappointment that they knuckled under and tried to copycat other shooters.

Dead Space, you sold out.