Dead Space (no spoliarz)

I haven’t beaten this game yet, but I’m enjoying it vastly more than Doom 3. It must be the lower mobility of the protagonist or something. Combat feels very different when you can’t backpedal or circle-strafe your way out the problem.

[quote=“CSL,post:150,topic:47279”]

And that’s why I used the Plasma Cutter 80% of the time, so simple and yet so effective and with cheap ammunition to boot.[/quote]

That only happens if you focus on one weapon. I maxed out stasis early and split points between everything else, so all four of my weapons were useful.

Given that I started on Medium, and soon realized that it wasn’t terribly demanding, I changed my upgrade strategy to prioritize* the weapons that I thought were fun. There probably isn’t a need to upgrade the stasis module at all, except that I love freezing enemies in slow motion and taking carefully aimed shots. Love it. Also the flamethrower - completely useless as it is almost always out of ammo, and you can’t “CUT OF THEIR LIMBS!” as it were. Still, the power of cleansing flame is so much fun, I couldn’t resist. Now I did upgrade the plasma cutter a fair bit, so I guess I always had a fallback, but the rest of my upgrades were designed to maximize my enjoyment of the game, and I’d encourage folks to give that a try rather than worrying about min/max.

(Actually, starting on Hard, as many people have mentioned upstream is probably the way to go. I’d replay it on hard if there wasn’t that silly difficulty locked “new game +” nonsense)

*note to any English folks reading this from HK, this is the American spelling.

I finished the game yesterday and found it much better than I thought it would be. Its main strengths are atmosphere and gritty, tight combat. Predictably the story was nothing to write home about, and the number of direct rip-offs of conventions and plot points from other games and movies is astounding - however, when that’s what they set out to do and admit to it freely, can you really complain? I think it, on the whole, executes those things well, derivative as it may be. Being a System Shock series fan it was at least worth checking out for that same feeling again.

I didn’t really like most of the weapons overall, I maxed out the Cutter and the Rifle, and they served me very well. I should have played on Hard, as I found the game overall really easy, but I didn’t want to change it because I just wanted to get through it and not be frustrated; I’ll try the unlocked difficulty at some point.

Just started it the other day. One complaint I have so far is that the few survivors I’ve run across don’t seem to be placed in a believable way. Also, the protagonist should really talk in this one, imo.

The latest issue of Edge mentions that this is a science fiction game that has a protagonist named Issac Clarke. I thought this was a nice touch, but it completely sailed over my head when actually playing the game. Given how Asimov and Clarke felt about each other (though I guess it was more of a running joke) I thought this was pretty funny.

So I’m on chapter 7 I think, didn’t have any real problems with chapter five. Anyone use all the weapons and have thoughts on each? I’ve mostly been updating my plasma cutter and suit. For secondaries I’ve been using the Line Rack, Ripper and Flame Thrower (for those stupid little buggers, they get me more than anything else.) Are the other weapons worth buying/swapping in?

I think the Force Gun is great for times when you’re in a tightly enclosed space and a monster spawns (excuse me, jumps through a grate) right next to you. The alt fire grenade of the Force Gun was also helpful for a particular type of enemy. I used the Line Rack a lot when I got into trouble, and the Ripper was just a lot of fun to use.

I managed to finish the game earlier today, and I must confess that by the time I reached the end of the game I was moving closer to Ben’s point of view than the one I held originally. I really enjoyed the first half of the game or so but I just ran out of steam probably around the 2/3 point. And definitely by the time I hit the last couple of levels I was just carrying on to see what was going to happen. Let me add for those that are playing for plot, it probably isn’t worth it. There’s a spoiler thread about the end of the game that you can read but there isn’t that much to spoil really; plot is almost an afterthought in this game. I enjoyed the mechanics and the atmosphere, and I felt like the story was going somewhere, but in the end it was another ‘funhouse in (insert setting here)’ type of story. Things don’t come together in the climax, so I’m a little let down. Of course decent plot in a game is more icing on the cake than anything else, but the game itself got a little too repetitive to keep my interest. Each stage was basically ‘creep through this weird part of the spaceship, kill these guys you’ve seen before, take the subway and repeat’ and so forth. I’d still say it was worth my time and money, but I had higher hopes from the start, and my interest just doesn’t maintain.

I think it’s quite reasonably lengthed, personally. It lasted about 11 hours on medium which was just about as much as I could take; I enjoyed it til the end.

Yeah, that’s definitely going to be one of those ‘your mileage may vary’ kind of things. I probably don’t have the attention span for this kind of game anymore. And I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t enjoy the game; I did for the most part, it just got to be a bit of a slog toward the end.

By the way, took me about 15 hours to get through the game, that is probably more than most people will take. I just hate to miss things, so I ran through each stage pretty carefully.

A little late to the party on this game, too many good games out there now, but I agree with most of the posts here. Only about 1/2 way through. Good game so far.

I’d like to emphasize that the decision to display the 3d HUDs, logs and object tags in the environment space is just fantastic. A nice change from the usual 4 corner static display interface.

I know this has been mentioned before as well but the sound is just great in this game. All the sounds have a nice thick bass quality, for instance when Isaac stomps, the thumping of his boots hitting the deck really portrays the feeling of a heavy space suit boot well. The muted sound of space is also a great touch. Love turning the sound up while playing this game.

I snagged the Dead Space animated comics on Live but I haven’t watched them yet, I get the vibe like they may be spoiler-iffic.

-Tim

The story of the comics and animated movie take place before the game events, so it’s not quite spoilers. However, despite all the attention that has been paid to the story, it’s not the game’s strong point - so if you want any revelations or insights you might as well play the game first and get anything you can out of it from that.

After spending a few hours with Dead Space (I’m about 5 hours into it now), I went back to the Zero Punctuation Dead Space review, and I can’t believe how dead on he is in that review. Usually there’s a lot of stuff in his reviews that I feel is exaggeration for the purpose of comedy, but he’s just so on-the-money with this criticisms of Dead Space.

The controls for the game are so good. I’ve never played a 3rd person game with controls that felt this solid, and a camera angle that felt this perfect. I’ve always liked the 1st person perspective so much more than 3rd person, but Dead Space is the exception because of the stellar job they did with the positioning of the camera. It feels as close to, and as immersive as a first person view. And all of that great control, visuals, etc is wasted because I just don’t care. I’m still enjoying the gameplay a lot, but it all feels so meaningless. The audio logs and text logs remind me more of Doom 3 than System Shock 2. It just seems like such a waste for someone to make this good a game and yet have it feel so meaningless, nullifying all the gains made on the gameplay front.

The 3D HUDs, the display of the health and stasis on the character itself, all that stuff is just so good. I really wish they’d hired a writer that could have taken it to the next level and made the story one I actually cared about, like in System Shock 2. Instead, up to Chapter 4, it’s all just so uninteresting.

I just finished Dead Space and I found it thoroughly enjoyable!

I hated, hated Resident Evil 4 (on PC), so I don’t get that comparison at all. Dead Space feels, to me, like Doom 3 with less of pure shooter design angle, as others have noted. More exploratory / tense / low-ish ammo horror. It’s easily the best third person shooter UI I’ve ever seen. The floating bits of screen UI in space were unique and worked fantastically.

I don’t agree with the criticism that the game is repetitive, at least not excessively so; you keep getting enough new weapons and new mechanics (physics, stasis, zero-g, etc) along with new, differently behaving enemies and new environments. The pacing wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly better than most games I’ve played.

Weapon balance, on the other hand, seemed really off. I tried a few different weapons (rifle, flamethrower) and had such bad results that I was scared off of spending my precious credits on crazy new weapons until the end of the game. The fully upgraded default gun worked great, and I never had to worry too much about ammo as long as I had time to aim for the limbs.

One problem with carrying around 3 weapons is that the game decides to give you 3 different ammo types in the creature drops, which means you’re always starving for ammo on your main workhorse gun. I eventually got tired of this, since the alt guns (at least the ones I tried) both sucked. When I sold my alt guns and carried only the default plasma slicer, I didn’t have this problem; I got mostly plasma cells and sold everything else at the store to fund other purchases.

I could tell the big finale was coming up so I blew my 130,000+ savings (in my defense, I was worried there would be a level 6 suit somewhere I would need to buy) on the energy beam weapon plus a bunch of power node upgrades for it.

I initially started this game on Hard but gameplay immediately became one of the worst possible game mechanics, the “always out of ammo min-max shooter”, where every gunfight is an exercise in how few shots you can fire to kill the enemies. I got a bunch of carry over money and nodes crap from finishing Medium so maybe that’s how they intend you to play Hard.

Anyway, great game. I even liked the story, at least once you got out of the “go fix the froozle, oh no wait, I meant the frazzle” mode of the first 4-5 chapters. The final scene was a bit of a cliche, though.

Before I uninstall Dead Space, I went back to an old savegame and tried some of the alternate weapon paths.

At the beginning of chapter 11, if I sell everything, can buy 1 weapon + ammo + 12 power notes worth of upgrades. For most weapons that’s at least 75% of the upgrade tree. I focused on damage and capacity when I could. These are my thoughts after playing the beginning of chapter 11 (bring up artifact from cargo bay) with each upgraded weapon. Lots of combat, against a tentacle and 6-12 of the different shambly guys.

  • Flamethrower

Can’t target limbs. Goes through ammo quickly. No real range. Doesn’t seem to do much burn over time damage. Alt-fire is a giant puff of flame. Pretty much a waste of time like I thought.

  • Pulse Rifle

This was the only weapon that did almost as well as the default gun, though it does tend to eat up a lot of ammo due to rapid fire and “shake” when firing. I really liked the 360 degree over-the-head alt fire, which is definitely useful if you’re being swarmed. This one seemed doable, but ammo consumption and lack of accuracy concerns me.

  • Force gun

No ranged attack whatsoever, can’t sever limbs very well. Alt fire is a grenade ball. Totally friggin’ worthless, except perhaps if you’re getting swarmed and want to push enemies back.

  • Beam gun

Pretty much a rocket launcher. Does LOADS of damage, but ammo is expensive to the point that every time you miss your target you’ll wince. Might be nice as an alt gun for larger enemies (the tentacles, the big bear guys, etc) where massive damage is your #1 concern, not blowing limbs off.

  • Ripper

Aiming the remote sawblade (not all THAT remote, since it’s maybe 10-15 “feet” in front of you at max range) is awfully fiddly to me, and again, makes it hard to sever limbs reliably. Fun to use, of course, but seems impractical. Alt mode, firing the blades, seems even more wasteful relative to the damage it does

  • Line Gun

Another fun gun to use, as it slices enemies apart with a horizontal beam. Could be effective if you have several enemies attacking in a row, as it’ll slice through all of them. However, this is yet another weapon which is sort of hard to slice limbs off with. Low capacity, though, and slow movement of the projectile makes it hard to “line up” reliably. (Alt fire is a weird landmine I forgot to try in combat, was having too much fun slicing things up like luncheon meat.)

So, my initial experiments were proven right: pretty much all the Dead Space weapons are crap, except the default one you start out with (with upgrades).

This might be the first FPS I’ve ever played where the gun you start out with is the best gun in the game.

What button are you supposed to mash when stuff jumps on your face? On PC, it pops up with a little box to tell you what key to press, but the box is blank in my case. There aren’t any blanks in my control config. Is it fire? I tried fire, to no avail, but I suck at button mashing so that’s inconclusive.

on my all default config that key is “E”

The Use key, ‘E’ by default.

That’s an interesting roundup of the weapons wumpus. I haven’t tried any of them, since I was going for the achievement to finish the game while using only the plasma cutter, and having a blast with it. I will disagree about Hard difficulty though. I’m now in Chapter 6 or 7, and Hard difficulty hasn’t really been about minimizing ammo use exclusively. Sure, when I’m going up against one monster, I carefully cut off limbs to minimize ammo use, but when I’m in a more desperate situation, I fire away, and I haven’t run out of ammo since the very beginning of the game. Once you get past the beginning, ammo is not THAT scarce, even on Hard. I guess it helps that I sell all other types of ammo I find in order to fund more plasma energy.

I’d also agree that the game is a lot more compelling to me than Resident Evil 4 ever was, and this is despite the story feeling a lot like Doom 3, which I also hated, even though I finished Doom 3 despite hating it. Nothing in Dead Space’s narrative really captures my interest and helps drive me forward. The only thing that does that is the gameplay. They just did a really, really good job with the feel of the controls and the combat in the game. It’s the first 3rd person game I’ve played that’s as satisfying as a first person shooter in terms of combat and controls.

Once you get past the beginning, ammo is not THAT scarce, even on Hard

Hmm, well, I’ve been burned by crappy game design here in the past (seriously, is the only way to make a game more difficult by scaling the enemy hitpoints up, and available ammo down?). I guess I saw it at the start and started imagining how much worse it would be later.

It is true on Medium at the end I had stupid amounts of money and sold a bunch of health packs I never needed. But I think that was partially because I was using only one weapon exclusively and selling everything else. If you were trying to feed an alt gun in addition to your primary (or even worse, 3 or 4 different guns), I doubt you’d do so well on ammo.