Checkpoint Breached: Dead Space 2: They didn't teach us any of this in engineering school...

Survival horror is a weird genre. It has a set of fans that are fanatical about the genre and a set of people who will outright refuse to play anything in the genre. It's odd to find a set of games who's popularity can also be measured by the amount of people who refuse to play it. Survival horror usually have a few things in common. The setting involves confined spaces, difficult combat, unsettling monsters and rely heavily on being atmospheric to come across as scary and tense.

Dead Space was one of the first games I played when I built my new computer. My old laptop had a fit just looking at the system requirements as laptops tend to do, but I was very interested in the game due to the press surrounding it. I rather liked Dead Space. The setting was good, the characters were interesting enough but weren't in the game much which was fine by me. It had good atmosphere and I really liked how much you interacted with the environments and I thought the combat had a good feel to it. I also liked the silent protagonist approach to the game's story. It made the character you in a way and made him seems like he was just a terrified engineer. Dead Space was also paced very well. You slowly gained better armor and weapons, the puzzles and enemy encounters slowly got more complex and tense, the environments changed nicely and was always introducing new and exciting areas. The game felt nice and well thought out.

Dead Space 2 departed from most of these to the great detriment to the game. In Dead Space, the game started and it was a while before you even caught a glance of a necromorph. It established the setting in a "Show you" sort of way and eased you into the game, setting and story. Dead Space 2 starts with a rather long cinematic that condenses the entire back story and storyline of Dead Space into one cinematic. After that, it brings up your girlfriend again and then pops to an interrogation room in a psych ward with Isaac talking to some unknown guy. Even though I haven't even started the game, I already like it less. I don't like that Isaac has a voice, I don't like his new voice and I'm already starting to not like Isaac at all. After that cinematic ends, Isaac is woken up in a psych ward by an unnamed character who is alive for exactly 38 seconds before turning into a necromorph directly in front of you. Then you have to run through said psych ward with no weapons or even control of your arms and the game attempts to make it frightening. This "brick to the face" sort of game intro really doesn't fit Dead Space at all.

After the intro sequence, the game actually gets tense for a bit. They make a point of not giving you a weapon right away which was good. One of the most tense moments comes after you "borrow" a gravity gun from a surgical suite. But once you get your weapons back and your engi rig, the game is pretty much back to the status quo of Dead Space 1.

The story is competent but doesn't really add too much to the overall story and I hate that Isaac has a voice and I hate how they made his character. If you want him to be a tragic hero, don't make him a snarky asshole, it really doesn't fit. Other than that I won't touch too much on the story since there's several twists and turns in the story that I don't want to ruin but the characters do get less awful as you get further into the game, it does get better if only slightly in my opinion.

What I will talk about is the good parts of the game. Dead Space 2 is a console port, in case you didn't know, but it's actually a very good one. A lot of times console ports don't bother giving the PC gamers much control over the game and tends to make the controls anywhere from kinda bad to downright unplayable. Assassin's Creed has this problem, it's just not designed for a keyboard and mouse. But Dead Space does a good job. The key maps make sense and are comfortable, the movement is in the sort of "toggle" style that makes using a keyboard easy and the aiming controls feel right at home on the mouse. A lot of game devs should take note of how well optimized the engine is. On "High", which is very pretty, the game ran at 110-130 fps which is a very small range and was incredibly steady. Even when things got tense and there was a lot on the screen it sat there like a rock. Now my GPU runs at about 54-56C when it's idle and only ever scrapes 70 in really graphic intensive games during the summer. Dead Space 2 was peaking at about 66 running at 120fps so I decided to give my GPU a break and turn on v.sync. This was the only problem I had with the game being a console port. V.Sync is supposed to set the fps to your monitor refresh rate, most of the time, including my case, that's 60hz or 60fps. But v.sync in Dead Space 2 sets it to the normal fps of a console game, which is 30 fps. Kind of annoying but I just turned it off, exited the game and forced v.sync through my graphics drivers, easy fix and worked flawlessly, it's a good port.

The game does have a few issues that are caused by it being born on a console that really couldn't be helped by the devs so I don't fault them, it's just stuff I noticed. The difficulty of the game is heavily reliant on the combat and the way the enemies move. Analogue sticks on controllers don't have acceleration as a design spec. The controller doesn't know how "hard" you moved the stick, only how far in any given direction. It would be possible to give sticks acceleration, but gamers have been trained over the years to adapt to not having it so adding it would be a bad idea. A mouse, however, is heavily reliant on acceleration. This makes the combat much easier as a result. It's fairly trivial to slice the legs off of a running enemy far before they reach a distance where they can hurt you. When I started the game I started on "normal" difficulty to get a feel for the game, it only took me 10 minutes with my first gun to turn it up to "Zealot" which actually made the game nicely challenging for most parts of the game. It had a good feel to it.

The game does settings very well. The lighting engine is very nicely done and the shaders take full advantage of this.

Very nice lighting

Really cool effects

The gameplay is also nicely varied with my favorite part being the zero gravity sections which are handled really nicely.

Not Zero G but an interesting section none the less

Overall I did end up liking Dead Space 2. It does sit rather meekly in the shadow of it's first incarnation which did almost everything better, it's still a competent game, just a misguided one. It forgot what made Dead Space 1 good and focused to hard on what they thought made Dead Space 1 good.

A lot of the heart string tugging came off as trying too hard. I had heard previously about a section in the game involving children and how the section was so unsettling and how horrifying the section was.

Why can't I hold all these feels

I just thought the section was funny. There was no set-up to it at all and I was mostly just happy that the enemies were easy to kill so I could save up some ammo. The babies in particular were supposed to be very unsettling but the way they walked was very comical and I laughed hysterically when I shot the first one and it's head went rolling off. It was just trying so hard to pull at heart stings that just aren't there.

Baby head bowling, I think I may have problems

Attempts to make the game scary also came off as campy and obvious to me. For example, at one point in the game you go onto a docked ship. The area is very cramped and has weird lighting and is rather unsettling in general. In this ship there's a log that you can find that talks about "ghosts" in the ship and particularly one that follows people around making scratching sounds while you're moving and stopping when you stop.

This would have been an amazing addition. There was this perfect opportunity to make a section of the game terrifying. Add the scratching in, add an enemy that you only catch glimpses of but can nearly constantly be heard. Make it change things in rooms you have to go through more than once, such as finding several bodies in a room just lying on the ground, go off and do something and then having them hanging from the ceiling by their entrails or something. At this point in the game, you expect there to be an enemy around every corner, removing all the enemies would make everything tense. You hear banging coming from beyond the door in front of you, but when you enter, nothing.

But alas, they just have you fight normal necromorphs in a rave.

The game did manage to keep me around until the end, including a particularly terrifying scene involving things going into other things in a very visceral and unnerving way and if you screw it up you have to do it again. And then a really annoying section that's blatantly ripped off of Resident Evil 4 but I still finished it. I just wish it had been more like the first one and with less voices in it.

Commence random screenshots because I took too many