If I say Resident Evil 4 chances are your eyes have already glazed over, reminiscing on moments when you were running through a village, knee capping Spaniards before kicking them in the face as you take shelter from the masked chainsaw man in a house. But were you scared, horrified, or even a little wet in your drawers? No, you weren’t, because Resident Evil 4 was not scary.
Resi 4 single headedly became one of the best video games ever whilst pushing the horror genre into action territory with scares becoming an after thought. Silent Hill disappeared off the map whilst games like The Suffering and Alone in the Dark jumped on the action bandwagon and it’s taken EA of all companies to wrench it back into the realms of the terrifying because, let’s face it, Silent Hill Homecoming isn’t that great.
Playing as Isaac, a love sick engineer on a small vessel, your crew answers a distress call from the planet cracker ‘Ishimura’ and after a rough landing, two of your crew members already dead and you isolated, your team makes the elementary decision that ’something isn’t right’.
Dead Space’s real triumph is its atmosphere, a perfect combination of visual, audio, and lighting. Whilst the combat is as fast as Resi 4 the designers managed to feel restraint, lights will go out and come back on without an enemy in sight, audio logs unsettle you and the sounds coming from every mechanism in the ship while lights play on shadows give the Ishimura the believability lacking from many game locations, you start to fear every door and sigh with relief as your fears don’t come to light.
But when it comes to combat, Dead Space is full of gusto as it gives you a small selection of well designed guns and abilities. You will be blasting tendrils off enemies to stop their advance, slowing them down, clobbering them with your gun and giganto boots while throwing explosive barrels at them, Isaac is a combination of Leon Kennedy, Gordon Freeman, and a drunk Staffs student who has downed one too many snakebites.
And that’s Dead Space, a ten hour effort to escape a doomed ship that takes plenty of cues from horror movies and games alike. Weapon upgrades and brutal difficulty levels mean there is enough meat for dedicated gamers to chew over but more importantly than that, the proper horror game is back! And if you’ll excuse me I just need to change my underwear.
The Re-playability factor
Unless you’re an achievement whore or someone who likes to push themselves with higher difficulties, Dead Space is not for you. But if you are then it will take several run throughs of fiddling with, upgrading, and using the various weapons and struggling through the ball squeezingly tough nightmare mode.
GMG Challenge Factor
Not much scope for challenges with this game, we might be able to squeeze one or two from its tight corridors and limb severing gameplay but it’s a very focused game.
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