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Video game review: ‘Dead Space 2’
Nearly two months ago, shortly after the late-January release of “Dead Space 2,” I could have easily given you a three-word review: “Scary, bigger, engrossing.”
This much time later, having played the game nearly every night for about a half hour to an hour at a time (with some breaks for necessary TV watching and South by Southwest Interactive), and after finishing the single-player campaign, I can say that those words still apply. The game retains the creepy, doomed mood of the first game, but packs it with more action, bigger set pieces and a logical continuation of the storyline for its hero Isaac Clarke (who is no longer a cipher; we now see his face and hear him talk).
Isaac was the hero of the original “Dead Space,” a great first effort in the franchise that was spooky, but almost too sparse in its design. If “Dead Space” was a stick-in-your-craw horror survival adventure like “Alien,” “Dead Space 2” is surely the James Cameron-ish “Aliens” with many more monsters and a better sense of over-the-top Hollywood spectacle.
In the first game, Isaac navigated a dark engineering spaceship that had been hit with what seemed like a horrible biological plague that turned its denizens into mutated, aggressive beasts. Isaac was searching for his girlfriend (bad idea) and (spoiler alert!) in a great twist, found her at the end of the first game.
She returns in “Dead Space 2” to haunt Isaac and guide him through a new set of adventures involving a huge space artifact called a “Marker,” a Scientology-like religion that took hold on a massive space station and and, of course, big beasties that must be taken down with a fine assortment of imaginative weaponry, psychic powers and evasion.
Unlike most shoot-‘em-up games, Isaac as a hero is in a fragile mental state. He hallucinates, sometimes collapses with emotional exhaustion and manages to express deep suffering without being whiny. The game tries hard to drop story clues as audio and text logs, but this game doesn’t quite master the storytelling the way “BioShock” did. That’s OK; the gameplay itself more than makes up for that.
I wouldn’t have kept on playing for so long, desperately trying to survive to each new save point, if the game wasn’t so well-produced. It looks great, has remarkably good sound design, tight controls that feel improved over the first game (especially in its zero-gravity sequences) and the right mix of challenge minus game-ending frustration. The game is disturbing (no more so than when you fight off waves of tiny monsters, ostensibly the space station’s human children who have been infected), but addictive. Isaac is a compelling lead character. The game’s space station is a marvel of level design (even a return trip to the first game’s Ishimura vessel feels fresh) and all the elements of the game feel improved and refined instead of repetitive. Multiplayer gameplay and several add-ons (a “Severed” downloadable game and “Extraction,” a bonus bundle for the PlayStation 3 version among them) keep the game going past the main campaign.
It takes a remarkable game to keep me invested for so long when there’s a stack of other worthy titles waiting to be played. “Dead Space 2” is one of those rare video games that’s worth investing the time to complete.
“Dead Space 2”
$40-$60, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PCs
Rated M for Mature (heavy, HEAVY gore and violence)
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By Michael T
March 25, 2011 9:46 AM | Link to this
I just finished it and agree with everything you said, better controls, better graphics, awesome sound, etc.
But I think the story line wasn't as involved or good as the first and the ending left a little to be desired. Very similar to FEAR 2.
Over all a decent play.