Game Review : Dead Space Part II

I have just completed the game yesterday and felt that I need to give another review. But instead of spoiling the story for you, I am going to talk more about the game details that amazes me.

As most of you know by now that the game graphics are really good and creepy, also you know about how scary sounding the game is. But did you know that when you enter certain areas, you can hear whispering, places like toilets and certain hall ways. It makes you wonder if you are going crazy or if the ship is haunted.

Another thing is the music score that accompanies the game. At more times than less, the music has saved me tonnes, due to the fact that when it changes you to dramatic/scary music, you know that one of those necromorphs are nearby, thus keeping you alert and ready for it.

The game does not make you do mundane tasks throughout, in fact most of the task you do on the ship, needs to be done. For example, in the first part of the game you run from nercomorphs and end up in a different area than the rest of your crew. In order for them to get to the bridge to find out what happened to the ship, you needed to repair the tram system that was blocked by a damaged tram.

Then there is the time that you find out that the ship is in a decaying orbit and was on a course to crash into the planet below. Needless to say that you had to somehow restart the engines. In fact all the tasks that I have done, was well thought out by the developers. No find key A to open door A here, rinse and repeat, you get the drift.

Now comes part where I talk about the Ishimura, this ship is big, HUGE as a matter of fact. but as big as it is, the layout of the ship looks believable that you are infact on a huge mining ship in the middle of space. Each level or part of the ship has its own unique feel and look to it. The medical sections look sterile, well at least it used to, the mining deck is dirty and gritty and even the executive rooms in the crew deck looks clean with carpets and spacious rooms.

Another thing to note is how well they thought out of the physics ingame. Especially when you went from normal gravity to Zero gravity and back. Things that will stay in motion in zero G uptill it is stopped by something like a wall or fan blade. How in zero G air currents will move things away. It may not be perfect physics, but to laymen like me, its good enough. The only thing that did not make sense to me is that at one point, you will be on the planet and there is this section of zero G on the planet. How does one get zero G on a planet?

Lastly I would like to talk about a mini game in the game. 2 if you count the shooting gallery. There is this place where you play some sort of zero G basket ball and you have to jump from panel to panel and then shoot the ball with your kinetic module into a scoring hole. you can then unlock certain lockers in the room before the zero G basketball court for items. I only played it once but I read that if you played the game and went to level 6 you get a trophy in the achievements for the game itself.

Achievements? Oh I forgot, you get trophy achievements for playing the whole game. For the ps3 version, you get a bronze achievement for completeing each level and different achievements for doing something in game, like killing a certain number of enemies with a certain weapon or doing a certain action for a set number of times. These achievements can be seen on the XMB of the PS3 under trophies.

To end this, I think the developers did a great job with the game, even with all the small details that made this game such a big hit. The marketing of this game is very good too. They even got a 6 chapter downloadable videos in a graphic novel style to give you a picture of what happened on the planet when they 1st found the marker and a feature length animation that shows what happens onboard the Ishimura before you were sent in. It gives you a complete picture of what happened and it furthers expands on the dead space universe. Not sure if a sequel will come out for this game, but I do hope that they will do one.