*WARNING! These reviews contains spoilers!*

by Owun Birkett

Imagine yourself waking up wearing a straitjacket, with no recollection on what’s going on or where you are. A staff member is helping you, until a giant alien organism comes out of nowhere and punctures his forehead. Parts of his body begin to stretch and tear, unknown limbs take form and you kick him aside. You’re still bound to the straitjacket and your only option is to run! That’s roughly how Dead Space 2 begins. No build-ups – just straight into the horror action.

The Dead Space series is one of those rare survival horror games that both genuinely excites and scares you. Granted, some horror buffs may not be freaked out by the odd jump scares here and there, but it’s all about tension and atmosphere, rather than just showing you as much blood and gore as possible, and developers Visceral Games do it really well.

You play as Isaac Clarke (taken from well-known sci-fi authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), an engineer who survived the previous game. Set three years later, Isaac is on a populated city called The Sprawl on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, Ever since interracting with an ancient relic called the Marker, Isaac has become mentally ill, and starts having hallucinations of his dead girlfriend. He has no recollection of his memories since the first game and before the events that are taking place. It’s as you progress that you start to find out what exactly happened.

The new addition to this game (other than new armour and weapons) is Isaac has a voice. No longer the mute character who just made grunt noises (sort of like Gordon Freeman from Half-Life, though he oddly didn’t make any sound when he was getting shot!), it’s actually nice to hear he’s got a voice, and to hear his thoughts and dealings with the other characters.

When you eventually find a Store – found in certain parts of the game to buy ammo, health, weapons (technically tools, though I don’t see how a flamethrower would be seen as a tool) and buying new suits – anyone who who played the previous Dead Space adventure starts to get into familiar territory. For those who haven’t played the first game (I suggest you do so, in order to follow the story), a simple tutorial will tell you on how all the gameplay mechanics work.

Your Heads-Up Display (HUD) isn’t conventionally featured on the corners of your TV screen, but on Isaac’s armour. The lights down your spine is your health. When you receive damage, the bars disappear and change colour from green, to yellow, with red being critical. The controls are fluid and not too hard to remember once you get the hang of it.

When battling the Necromorphs, you cannot simply just shoot them, but have to dismember them. Again, this will be all familiar to Dead Space veterans. But this time,  instead of the awkward aim and leap Zero-G sections, you are given free movement with additional boosters on your suit.

The environments will look the same at times, but they certainly have an organic feel. You have a tour through a shopping centre, a day-care centre and even little humorous moments (I say that relatively lightly) where you see sets of balloons at a hospital saying “Get Well Soon!” Though there are disturbing moments aplenty when you venture into The Sprawl. You hear people screaming for their life in hotel rooms, a child yelling in agony inside a tumble dryer and even an abandoned infant crying his or her eyes out among the chaos.

The sound design is brilliant, hearing noises at every corner and even giving you false alarm scares when something like a shower hose goes off. The music should be recognised too, as it definitely brings tension when fighting the Necromorphs – both key elements in making a satisfying horror experience.

The Necromorphs themselves are actually quite terrifying and grotesque in design. They’re human corpses, but transformed and reanimated after an alien organism infects them. If you think the children and infants were spared, think again! There are creatures called the Swarm, where pale-looking children come out in packs and try to slash you to death. I can see this will spark controversy from the International Nanny Association (INA), as they did with Visceral Game’s previous game, Dante’s Inferno.

Dead Space 2 is a bit routine throughout the single-player campaign – meet new characters, fight your way through, fix some circuits and so on and so forth. The characters are either surprisingly tough or completely insane. Not much variation and the majority of them are just meat waiting to be torn up.

I can’t say much about the multiplayer other than what you may have heard or read elsewhere. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend the multiplayer as it really does feel tacked on and gets old really quickly after a game or two. Left 4 Dead is still the best multiplayer game of the similar type of matches.

Owun’s Verdict: If you’re a fan of science fiction and survival horror games, don’t hesitate to purchase this game. The single-player campaign has a strong enough story and enough re-playability to obtain all those Achievements/Trophies for all you hunters out there. For PlayStation 3 Move owners, I strongly suggest you play Dead Space: Extraction. A hugely fun addition to the Dead Space series.

Dead Space 2 is a visceral roller-coaster ride.

********

by Junior Smart

You wake up to see Isaac Clarke running towards you – do you:
A: Congratulate him – Dead Space revived the somewhat saggy and stale survival horror game genre?
B: Welcome him into Unitology religion?
C: Duck, because a NECROMORPH IS PROBABLY BEHIND YOU!

If Isaac Clarke were to be real then it is possible, just possible, that he would be one of the most unluckiest people in history. Perhaps almost unlucky as say, having a brother named Chris Redfield and an older sister named Ripley.

After the horrific events of Dead Space, our protagonist Clarke wakes up three years later to a worse situation than he left things. Roused from his sleep on a space station known as the ‘Sprawl’ with a new outfit; a firmly fitting straitjacket, Isaac finds that the place is besieged by the reanimated corpses known as Necromorphs – truly hideous creatures of every child’s worst nightmare.

That isn’t all. There is evidence that the ‘Marker’,  or at least ‘a Marker’ is what is behind the outbreak. Was it destroyed, was it rebuilt or was their another one? On top of that he is in real inner turmoil. I mean, he is seriously carrying ‘extra baggage’ at losing his girlfriend and memories of the utter horrors that he faced during the events of the first game are messing with his melon.

If I were him I would probably bury my face in my hands and cry. Either that or kill myself. Lucky for us he doesn’t, and that entire psychological trauma creates a compelling rollercoaster ride that inexplicably draws you in from the very first scene where he is literally fighting for his life.

Dead Space 2 offers just a few improvements over the original, but then as the saying goes ‘if it isn’t broke – don’t try and fix it.’

Here in the ‘let’s do it by the numbers’ territory synonymous with sequels, what we have is ‘bigger means better’. That equates to larger arenas to fight for your life in, more types of Necromorphs to take on and new variants of weapons to use.

In addition to the main single player campaign, you have an online multiplayer mode where the players are divided into Isaac-type workers and Necromorphs – an idea I am not entirely sure works as well as the developers hoped for. Also bundled in with the Limted and Collectors edition is the great on-rails shooter Dead Space Extraction which was previously a Wii exclusive.

If the devil is in the detail, then the first thing that grabs you about Dead Space 2 from the get-go is the details. The immaculate presentation of the game is very nicely done with a video you can watch from the first menu which narrates the story so far for new players and those who have not played the first game.

The in-game graphics are also very polished. The playing area this time is The Sprawl – a vast urban space station complete with hospitals, shopping centres, sleeping quarters, schools, and other locations all of which are vividly realised and help create that lingering kind of foreboding atmosphere that is different from the first game. Recorded announcements echo around you in the shopping centre and you can hear the screams of a Necromorph’s victim down dark corridors as you ready your weapon and prepare yourself to take on the forthcoming horror.

However, horrific action is what this game is all about and being more linear in its approach doesn’t take anything away from Dead Space 2 at all. True to his engineer profession, Isaac’s weapons are more modified tools, rather than out-and-out weapons. Still, taking on Necromorphs and blasting the limbs off the hideous creatures has never been better. All of the weapons from Dead Space return in this game, including the plasma cutter and line gun. Yep, there’s that ‘if it isn’t broke – don’t try and fix it’ mantra again.

Controversially, the program developers, Visceral Games, decided to give Isaac a voice in this sequel, a move which has divided gamers all over the world. While I sat firmly on the fence on this issue previously, I am pleased that they did this as it gives the central character a bit more to play with in the course of the proceedings.

To be honest, he’s a bit bland as a character, but it’s interesting how they play out his mental psyche. No matter what is going on for him, whatever problem he faces during the course of the game -repairing a lift, talking to an official – he never lets slip or tells anyone what is going on for him mentally. In that sense, he kind of reminds me of the television character ‘Dexter’, because as a player you know the real deal with what is happening for him and it is almost like a secret you share, which is a rare factor for games.

A new ‘big is better’ feature in Dead Space 2 is the dramatic ability in certain rooms to fire out a window. Due to being in space, this causes the area to decompress and suck everything – tables, chairs, Necromorphs and yes, you – out into the vacuum that is space. The only way to save yourself is to quickly shoot a sensor that brings a metallic emergency door down over the source of the decompression. It is risky, it is thrilling and yes , it is nothing but big bucks Hollywood, but I would be lying if I said I could grow tired of it as it brings some welcome relief to what is otherwise a dark and serious story.

Other set-pieces involve trains, a couple of a nice zero-G environments which allow for some nifty 360 degree movement, ‘Resident Evil’ style pursuits by massive Necromorphs and some real shocking flashback sequences that make you wonder whether poor Issac is going to break.

For the most part though, the rest is standard fare. Fix this elevator, repair a few drills, speak to this person, get to this or that location, save someone who has information or can guide you…. you get the picture. Unfortunately, none of this is terribly exciting and harks back to days of Resident Evil where you had to get a key and then go to a room to use it. There are the occasional simple puzzles you encounter and a basic hacking mini-game which you must frequently complete but that is it, for better or for worse,

Unfortunately, the dreaded camera angle issue from first game, although improved, remains to rear its ugly head and create frustration to games players who buy this title. Quite often I found that when you’re backed up against a wall and a Necromorph gets too close to you, the camera often won’t show you your assailant. This destroys your targeting unless you move around to get a decent angle. Meanwhile, you’re under attack and trust me, those Necromorphs won’t have pity. This means by the time you line up to deal out some ‘poetic justice’, your health will be halved. I found this happened quite a lot and shouldn’t be in a sequel of such quality.

The online multiplayer offers some replay value and some extension to the game’s 12+ hours to complete. Divided into humans and Necromorphs with up to four players on each side, the multiplayer gives the human team a series of objectives they need to complete within a time limit. As I said before, this doesn’t work as well as I guess the programmers hoped for because it seems like a last minute addition.

Although you can start new games and carry over all your purchased or upgraded equipment, it seems that they thought not much more could be done than in the main game. As a result, the objectives seem like crude takeaways of the main game, e.g. interacting with consoles, carrying items, destroying objects and well, it is boring. What’s more, team-based online play has been done before many times for example in ‘Aliens’ and with more or less every type of third and first person shooting game out there. It is a shame that with such a good storyline in the main game they didn’t come up with more than this for the multiplayer.

Dead Space Extraction? Well, this is the same great, story-driven on-rails shooter which was the Wii exclusive of 2009. It covers the story before the events of Dead Space and during the same time as the animated film Dead Space: Downfall.

Having played the original on the Wii, I was pleased that sufficent graphical enhancements were made. Looking smoother than ever in high-definition, Extraction’s story is played from the first person’s perspective and brings some strong characters into the storyline along with the Church of Unitology – the people who have an unhealthy interest in those trouble-causing Markers.

The action is as intense and white knuckle ride as you’d expect from a Dead Space game, and even two players can play at once. In the early stages, it plays with your psyche much the same way as it does with Isaac. The Wii version’s excellent controls have been transferred seamlessly to the PlayStation Move, using it to aim at enemies and twisting it to activate the weapon’s secondary firing mode. That’s the way this game should be played, though if you are a controller down and you want a friend along for the ride they can fumble through it with a DualShock, too.

Junior’s verdict: Well, Dead Space 2 doesn’t bring with it too many original features and does nothing to change the genre. It does have a few nagging faults, but it’s an outstanding game nonetheless, packed with enough details and terrifying stomach-churning scenarios to keep your heart racing. Having Dead Space Extraction flung into the mix for free makes this title great value for money. Let’s get this right – this game is gory, this game is in your face, this game is worth playing. However, after completion, I doubt you will stick around for too much longer in the multiplayer.

9/10