Dead Space 3 Review

Dead Space 3 Review:

How does a great and modern franchise fall?

Dead Space 3 is the latest entry up to this date on the Dead Space franchise. It has already been a while since it's release and I was avoiding it because of the critics it received and overall poor feedback from friends of mine who loved the franchise as much as I did, if not more. I don't mean to say Dead Space as a whole is doomed and may never see the light of day again, but I do believe they attempted to turn an otherwise excellent franchise in a horrible, thorn riddled direction. In this review I would also like to draw some parallel lines between this last installment and the 2 previous ones so you guys can see which aspects I believe were lost and which were gained during this series's evolution.

I decided to make this review even though Dead Space 3 was released back in February because I brought myself to play its campaign with a friend in the famous co-op mode this entry brought to the table. So without further explanations to give and no desire to drag this around any longer here's what Dead Space 3 is all about.

this is what I've been doing on holidays, am I not the most social human being there is, playing co-op dead space 3

Summary: The Dead Space franchise WAS (past tense) a horror and survival game oriented series, they take place in the eerie, terrifying setting that is well, as it's name would imply, outer space. You play as Isaac Clarke, a space engineer haunted by nightmares and horrible experiences that must save humanity from a zombie-like alien infection. In the first entry you find yourself in the creepiest place in all of the series, the Ishimura, a mining space shuttle and ship that just never ceased to run chills down your spine. Almost every nook and cranny had an unpleasant surprise for you and its confined hallways warrantied nervous breakdowns when you saw yourself crammed in them with a bunch of necromorphs (the alien zombie things). On the 2nd entry you saw yourself roaming around the city of Sprawl. a space colony that is a bit more open and comfy to Isaac, but still filled with unnerving new enemies and a couple of places that beat the Ishimura's butt in terms of sheer creepiness. Finally you see yourself in a city in a moon that located well, umm... somewhere (shit's too wacky and not explained well so I don't quite remember) and you are tossed around by this group of half terrorists half rebels that want to gather an alien artifact that you've already dealt with a couple of times, so that makes you the right guy for the job.

So, let's talk positives first, in this particular entry, you can play the whole story with a friend! And if you do so, you even get some extra hours of gameplay! So that is pretty cool, the only downside to this feature that I couldn't quite understand is that you need 2 copies of the game to do so. What I mean to say is: It's not local, in order to play the co-op version of the campaign you need 2 consoles or computers each one with a working copy of the game. This baffled me. Why wouldn't you just make a split-screen mode!?

I know this game was terrible but the split-screen was a welcome feature, cmon EA stop trying to empty our pockets

Another kind of cool feature is the revamped crafting system which lets you basically pack 2 weapons into one and give secondary effects to its sight or its bullets. There is one problem with it though, when you reach about 60% completion if you've been paying attention, gathering blueprints and pieces, you can make some overpowered weapons that will practically make 9 out of 10 encounters a walk in the park. (I beat the game on hard mode, I know it isn't hardcore but it was still very very easy)

Now for negatives and boy o' boy are there a bunch of them this time around. First of all, the game changed genre's and just to be clear, I saw this coming since Dead Space 2's release only DS2 didn't make it so obvious. Dead Space 3 is a 3rd person shooter action game. All of its survival elements are gone and the horror is barely even there, a few jump scares that aren't even that well employed are the only things that make you nervous, at most. The story this time around is so convoluted and unbelievably disengaging that it is a miracle I could even understand half of what was going on. (I've got a short attention span don't judge me) Finally the setting this time around varies a bit more than in previous games which is nice but none of these places make you feel frightened, which to be honest is the whole point of a setting in a self-proclaimed survival horror game.

Explosions, yes, you'll be seeing a lot of them here, no more dark creepy hallways, just, well.. BOOM for you ;D

What bothers me the most about this entry is not a valid reason to give it a low score. It's just personal preference, but for a healthy mind's sake and more happy readers let me elaborate:

-On the first Dead Space, Isaac Clarke was a mute and even a faceless man for the vast majority of the game and that let me empathize with him, he wasn't speaking over radio transmissions every 2 seconds he was just grunting when he stomped item boxes and grunting even louder when apprehended by a necromorph. since DS2 he's been given a voice and not just for cutscenes, entire sequences are riddled with dialogues of him chatting over the radio with his allies and enemies and the constant speeches don't make you feel alone and helpless. You feel completely safe and the horror aspect of the game is broken to me, this only intensifies in Dead Space 3. Not only are you joined by a friend if you play co-op you also spend about 80% of the game in a conversation with someone which is just dumb, it completely kills the mood this series was known for back when Dead Space made its debut in back in 2008.

conversations, conversations everywhere

-The plot of the whole franchise has never been it's major strength, it isn't bad by any means but it's nothing to write home about if we're really honest. Some minor sub-plots though are very interesting and bring the story to life, they motivate you and make you care for Isaac. Since DS2 Isaac has become an inconsistent character, he seems like a complex character with deep issues but throughout the games you evidence he's just troubled for a couple of minutes at the worst point of his adventure and then he always gets back on the horse, finds a new girl and kills some more necromorphs so to me he basically lost all that made him relate-able. He just looks like a COD character in my eyes, and I mean that as a bad thing.

-During my play-throughs for both DS and DS2 I didn't encounter a single bug, glitch or error whatsoever. But Dead Space 3 was a whole different deal, it was one after the other it basically turned the whole experience into an endurance test for my patience as a player who despises glitches in a game. Here's a quick list of all the errors me and my friend encountered:

I was browsing the webz like a cute internet cat for glitch to show you guys 

and the first I found was one that actually made the game scarier so it doesn't quite help my cause

a) Aim fixation, my friend who used the keyboard to play it, found himself locked in an "aimed down the sight" state through about 2 chapters of the game after which he decided it was ruining his experience and decided to look for a fix online. After a few minutes he found one, it consisted of mashing the TAB key over and over again and this, ladies and gentlemen, fixed the issue lightning fast. But it was still pretty annoying, resetting the game, re-hosting it, changing hosts, rebooting his PC, none of this fixed it so that is one annoying problem to encounter if you ask me.

b) Out of sync cut scenes, this happened to us twice: One happened in a cut scene in which Isaac and his friend are captured by some human enemies and this was apparently followed by a shootout, only it wasn't followed. It happened at the same time, the NPCs were just standing there when we arrived at the scene and the cut scene suddenly triggered, some of the dialogue was past us and the other enemies were shooting at us while it happened. So there we were, listening to a menacing speech from the bad guy while we were being shot at. Want to know how I figured this was a mistake? well an NPC was grabbing me by the neck with his stump of an arm he just lost during the cut scene. Yes, the enemies shot their own friend's arm off and he was using a phantom limb to hold me down, the NPC that brought my friend into submission lacked a head by the end of the cut scene and we took a lot of shots too, they didn't kill us but our full health bar was nearly depleted when the cut scene ended and the real shootout began. The other time was just goofy and it won't be mentioned.

c) Invincibility, this sounds cool right? Well it happened, it didn't last long, not because it was a one time deal but because my friend was terrible at climbing sections. At one point in the game he started using the Bench (or crafting table) to make himself some weapons and he was caught by a necromorph. He forced himself out of danger and afterwards he was immune to damage, ALL DAMAGE. He could be mangled by a necromorph in a combat cut scene and he would receive no damage whatsoever, the only way he would die was if he let the creature devour him, but even then he would re-spawn with invincibility. He managed to turn it off accidentally when a chunk of ice the size of a truck fell on him during a climbing sequence but if he was any better at climbing he would have carried me like dead weight for the rest of the journey.*

And these 3 things my friends are basically legacy breaking flaws in my book. When you lose complete sight of what your amazing game was in the beginning, you let it's spark extinguish and it's magic disappear. Many friends of mine and I believed Dead Space to be Resident Evil's true successor but they both went down the same path, making over the top, explosion filled set pieces and overall action games that forget their true essence.

This                                is scarier than                                   This

So there is a problem here

Visuals: The game looked very good, there was an occasional frame rate drop but I blame our slow internet connections for it. Most of the particles and scenery were astonishingly well designed and just a pleasure to watch. So no downside here, just nothing transcendent. 8/10

Gameplay: If you can ignore the multiple and frequent bugs. The gameplay and controls are tight, everything is responsive and just fun to play. Though not only the survival and horror parts of the game's genre are gone, the difficulty was kicked down a couple notches. It is no longer vital to aim at the limbs in order to win an encounter with the dreaded necropmorphs, with the many overpowered weapons at your disposal and overall weaker enemies than in the previous games you can just aim at the torso and maul your foes which feels great but offers no challenge for the player. 5/10

Story: I personally didn't like DS2's story at all. The whole shock of hearing Isaac speak that much for the first time just killed it for me, but I still think it's better paced and well driven than the one Dead Space 3 offers. This time around you're just tasked to do one thing after the other and you lose sight of your true objective every 2 minutes. I'd bet this wasn't a bad plot on paper, but it was executed poorly from my perspective. 6/10

Music: Just as good as the pieces you can find in the previous games, which are OK, nothing to write home about but they do help you feel the intensity of the action set pieces and the mystery of an abandoned space station. 7/10

Final Verdict:

Dead Space 3 dismembered it's franchise's genre like Isaac used to dismember necromorphs, by removing the games Horror and Survival aspects and making it one of the easiest 3rd person shooter games I've played to date. It basically dishonored the Dead Space family name. There is still fun to be had, you do not need to have played the previous ones to enjoy or understand this one, Hell! I played the previous ones and didn't comprehend a single thing of what was going on for more than 2 minutes at a time. So if you're a fan of big action set-pieces, sci fi shooters with spooky looking enemies and games that allow you to play the whole story in co-op mode, get this game when its on sale or something, you'll have your fun. To those of you who are Dead Space fans: If you are afraid that playing this game might ruin your experience with the series as a whole, well that depends on your tolerance level, it only hammered in the last nail on the coffin for me. But I do go by a couple of wise words my older brother once spoke to me: "Don't knock it, till you try it".

6.5/10

Bubbye!

*For those of you would like to know about the conditions in which the glitches and bugs were triggered, we played the Origin version of Dead Space 3 on PC.

**For the native english speakers, I apologize for the grammar errors. I'm still getting the hang of this language, it is in my best interest to write as adequately as possible but please do not let those mistakes take away from the article's meaning and objective.

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