With Halloween right around the corner I decided it was high time to revisit the Dead Space franchise. I loved the first game; but, for some reason I neglected to play any of the other ones. I dusted off my PS3, popped in a copy of Dead Space 2, turned off all the lights, and prepared to be scared. I never expected to be so damn frustrated.
It wouldn’t be so frustrating if the game's highs weren’t so high. The beautiful environments, the ambient storytelling, the ominous sound design, the palpable sense of dread. I loved the space walks. I loved sections where I had to slowly make my way down a dark corridor. Unfortunately, these creepy elements only seem to exist as a bridge to more action heavy set pieces. Often the scary sections were rarely challenging, and the hard sections were rarely fun.
Most of the times I died, it felt cheap or unavoidable: I missed a QTE, got sucked out an airlock, or was one shotted by a boss. As the game went on, encountering waves of enemies in a single room became commonplace. Imagine trying to manage your limited ammo and life only for an enemy to spawn from behind and kill you. Eventually, I lowered the difficulty just to see the rest of the story, and beautiful environments, but I still lost interest as the frequency of action set pieces increased.
I was looking back at the first game with rose tinted glasses. The first game still had a lot of the same issues, but I remembered all of the good things instead. The Dead Space games suffer from an identity crisis. A foot in both horror and action. The games kept leaning more towards action as they went on, and they suffered for it. One game that found a better balance was the more recent Alien Isolation which still had action heavy sections, but they rarely felt as unfair. The Dead Space franchise could rise again, but it would need to dismember its action heavy arm, and commit to being more of a horror game.
Pleas check out my article on the rise of free to play games or the Walking Dead