Ok, so, Dead Space.
You play as Isaac Clarke, a SPACE REPAIRMAN who, along with the crew of the USG Keillor have to go and perform routine
ntenance on the USG Ishimura - a mining ship class known as the "Planet Cracker" for literally tearing a chunk of the planet out into space and strip mining it for all of its valuable minerals and such. Also, he wants to get back in touch with the love of his life, a scientist named Nicole who's also on the ship.
This wouldn't be much of a game unless things had gone horribly, cripplingly wrong, and that "horribly, cripplingly wrong" is horrors of space monsters coming to gib you violently.
StoryEver see "Event Horizon?" Or "Aliens?" Read sci-fi genre fiction?
This game cribbed from ALL OF IT.
The story itself doesn't give your character time to pause and ask "WHAT THE FUCK!?" because its all about jumping from one fan with shit hitting it to another fan with similar problems.
And its not even that the story isn't damnably original, its about the presentation of the story - you see what you are experiencing... and then you find audio and text logs to let you hear and read what happened to the Ishimura before you arrived, kinda like Bioshock did, like Doom 3 did before that, like System Shock 1 & 2 did before tha- y'know, its been done, but as long as its not intrusive to the gameplay, that's fine.
GameplayThis is what Resident Evil 4 was going for.
Instead of being about scares, its about action - the atmosphere lets you psyche yourself out well enough, it doesn't go to the cheap scares often... and some of the stock "OH SHIT!" scares you come to expect at the tail end of other Survival Horror games are spread out a bit better throughout the game - including one near the start to kick you in the balls and punish you for using all your Plasma Cutter ammo.
Oh, you can waste your ammo grossly, firing wildly into the mass of writing flesh coming to rip you in twain, or you can not be another checkmark on the body count and be strategic - using your mining tools for... y'know... dismemberment.
You get other guns - and each gun has a secondary fire that makes it useful in all kinds of situations. For example, the Plasma Cutter only has Vertical and Horizontal firing for its secondary fire - why would that be useful? There's a giant fat Necromorph (the game's monster) that will expunge monster babies when you shoot it in the stomach. A lot of monster babies. They will fuck you up.
You probably want to avoid shooting it in the stomach, so, you go to Horizontal Fire and cut its leg out from underneath it - then you go to Vertical Fire and cut its arms off. What's that? Shoot it in the head?
Oh ho ho ho. Do it. I dare you, better, let me watch.
SoundSpot on - the ship's creaking and groaning on its own, monsters are smashing walls and glass and there's one monster who will scream at you, laughing as it chases you down.
Its scream is like the very matter that fuels nightmares.
Isaac himself is a mostly silent protagonist, but you can hear his panicked breathing as he runs for his life - how he gasps for air in the vacuum of space - manly grunts as he STOMPS A BITCH TO DEATH.
There's Voice Acting by living people too, but its not great. Thankfully, you'll not see them constantly and its good when it NEEDS to be.
OverallRemember last year how everybody was all "OMFUX BIOSHOCK!!!"
Yeah. I like this better than Bioshock - a lot of people like it better than Bioshock - and honestly, the story is paced better than Bioshock.
EA is giving this the full on treatment - comics, art books, animated movies... on XBox Live, PSN and the website (deadspacegame.com) you can see animated prequel comics that tell you what happened on the planet before the shit really started hitting the fan.
I can't recommend this enough, I really can't.