Looking Forward: Dead Space 2

Now hopefully a lot of the people who will be reading this have played the original Dead Space since it was easily one of the most enjoyable horror games. The things that made it so enjoyable were not the reasons you might be thinking about. Sure, the game was pretty scary once you got into it but there is such a deep universe behind this series that allows the game to take you on a Necromorph infested journey through Dead Space hell as Issac Clarke, engineer extraordinaire. Now there were several things in Dead Space that were really interesting that concerned the story, one of these thing was Issac’s strange form of dementia that he acquired while aboard the Ishimura in the first game. This is still a huge factor in the second game and it is revealed to us in one of the first trailers that this strange form of dementia that Issac has will ultimately kill him if he is not treated for it. Now there are multiple instances in Dead Space where that dementia he has is completely screwing with both Issac and the player’s heads, for example, seeing Issac’s wife multiple times and even having to defend her from attacking Necromorphs that may or may not be real is a bit of a mind-bender. From what I’ve been able to find on the game has given me such great hope for the series as Issac develops as a character and as the Dead Space universe becomes more and more complex and interesting.

Now the gameplay in Dead Space was everything it needed to be, good, fun, edgy, and while this may or may not be a good thing, it was moderately slow. While aiming you were basically not able to move faster than a crawl and while this made the game a lot more terrifying, it also caused some problems when necromorphs dropped down from random places and eviscerated you. Dead Space two seems to have tweaked this by still giving that suspenseful feel while also giving Issac more mobility and general freedom of movement. There were a lot of gameplay mechanics that were carried over from what I could tell, such as the strategic dismemberment, the stasis module, the use of super pro engineering weapons to dispatch the super undead, yeah, you get the picture. All of those things that gave the gameplay a really nice feel are being kept but the Dead Space 2 team continues to add and tweak the gameplay to give us what looks to be, a superb game. The weapons in Dead Space were always fun but it was nice to be able to fall back on your trusty plasma cutter. In Dead Space 2 one of the weapons they have shown in the trailers is a gun that pins necromorphs to walls like they are a sick decorative ornament. Let me be the first to say, this is awesome. I love the idea of pinning an arm or a leg of a charging horror to the wall where it so rightly belongs, all nice and pinned to a wall, far away from my face. Another thing that seems to have been modified is the Zero-G gameplay. In Dead Space this was supposed to be a kind of freaky scenario that usually involves necromorphs hurling themselves at you from every angle. From what we can see in Dead Space 2 the Zero-G sections have been changed in a big way. Yes the necromorphs will still throw themselves at you like the freaky jerkbags that they are but the development team thought it would be a good idea to give Issac a bit more freedom here too, so they gave him a jetpack thing so he can navigate these much easier than in the previous game where he had to jump from surface to surface. All-in-all I feel very good about this game and while I may be out of room to write, this is only the tip of the iceberg, there is so much left to talk about concerning this game. From what Visceral games has shown us so far has put my hopes up very high since the first game was quite enjoyable, I expect great things from Dead Space 2, and now hopefully you do too.