Space Station Evil

If you took Chris, Leon and Jill and put them on a Space Station you’d get Dead Space. If you know who Chris, Leon and Jill are, then Dead Space might be right up your alley. If you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, it’s called Resident Evil and it’s all the rage these days.

Dead Space is a survival-horror action game which places you in command of Isaac, an engineer who is sent as part of a small team to repair the Space Station Ishimura after it has gone eerily silent. From here you’re tasked with finding key cards, computer boards, repairing communication arrays and all sorts of typical and sometimes boring foot work. Fortunately, you’ll also find yourself jumping onto ceilings and clinging to walls while in zero gravity, traversing the surface of an asteroid and blasting the arms, legs, heads and tails off baddies while running across the hull of the Ishimura. For every lame “flip that switch” mission objective, there is always something equally inventive and fun to go do.

Combat is intense and frequent in Dead Space and sometimes consists of tackling a lone creature in a hall, or clearing out waves of enemies in a room before you can progress. The focus here revolves around blasting limbs off your enemies as it’s the most effective way to deal damage and conserve ammo, both things you’ll want to be paying a lot of attention to. The weapons are varied enough and fun to use. They help compliment the action and allow for plenty of ways to dish out mayhem. The enemies come in a few different forms, with different weakness, and switching back and forth between weapons on the fly (four can be mapped to the d-pad) to take out a room, or because that lurker is breathing down your neck and reloading right now isn’t an option, are all very satisfying experiences.

Dead Space does get a few things wrong. Although cool to look at, the holographic map is barely usable. That’s balanced out by the fact that the mission structure is so linear, and allows for so little exploration that you wont ever really have a reason to call your map up to begin with. And even on the hardest difficulty setting, called impossible, the game is never all that tough.

All things considered, Dead Space does far more right than it does wrong and if you’re an action fan, a survival-horror fan, or a sci-fi gamer, you would be doing yourself a favor to check this one out.