Isaac wore an engineering suit that looked suspiciously like knight's armor. All the new tools you found along the way were similarly weaponized, filling in the traditional spectrum of shooter toys: pistol, machine gun, shotgun, flamethrower, and a power saw. The wrench and screwdriver that you'd shown up with were not once used constructively and instead instantly transformed into guns. Add in a parable about apocalyptic religious extremism, government collusion, innocents betrayed, and a growing suspicion over your own actions and Dead Space portends to be a breakthrough.īut video games are not about their backdrops, and the foreground in Dead Space was shooting and lots of it. Surviving this onslaught in isolation while tinkering your way across the broken ship with a wrench and a screwdriver sounds brilliant - a combination of lush visuals, vicarious storytelling, and non-combative logic puzzles in extraordinary circumstances. But surprise! There are razor-clawed space zombies nesting there, the result of an alien artifact that triggers cellular mutation that turns carriers into Necromorphs. The concept sounds fantastic, an engineer with no military history sent to repair a marooned ship that his girlfriend happens to work on. The original Dead Space lasted an hour or so before reaching this threshold for me. Thus there is a natural limit on the amount of fear in shooting at slime monsters in the dark. Weapons are tools of empowerment and enemies are the sounding boards that reveal just how powerful the weapon in your hand is. Using a weapon is an inherently terrifying act, but the way that most video games imagine it creates the opposite effect. Paradoxically, it's a tactical shooter that constantly punctures the horrors I begin imagining for myself in its gloomy space station corridors. Dead Space 2 purports to be a horror game.
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