Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2
Dead Space 2 is the action packed sequel to Dead Space. The Aliens to Alien if you will. Instead of a claustrophobic spaceship after an outbreak you’re in the thick of it, being trapped on a space station during one.
You still play as Issac Clarke but he is no longer a silent protagonist. This makes sense for the type of game Dead Space 2 is compared to Dead Space 1 but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I’m too much of a fan of silent protagonists to be happy when they get a voice. This was done to make Clarke more sympathetic but mainly so that he can interact with the game’s larger cast. Issac is a man of people, aka an everyman but as the game reaches its climax he gets a little more unhinged. He is still suffering from Marker induced hallucinations.
Issac escapes from a mental hospital he has been trapped in on the Sprawl, during a Necromorph outbreak. We find out that the director of the Sprawl Hans Tiedemann is trying to recreate the Marker using the blueprints in Issacs and other mental patients’ minds. Now Issac and his rag-tag group he manages to pull has to stop the Marker from doing its Convergence thing.
If none of that made sense that’s okay, this game is really first time player friendly. Although I do not understand jumping into a series with any number but 1, but hey you do you. It has multiple moments that lets you in on what happened last game and all the important bits you need to know about Issac and the Marker.
The thing I like about this game is the environments looked lived in. I can actually see living on this space station just from the little areas we get to roam around in. We see shopping centers, a school and even different living quarters depending on your religion. There is no surprise that this game is trying it damndest to cut you with that edge. You can tell just by watching ads for it. Lots of violence against dead children and I will never recover from the infamous eye surgery scene.
This game plays like an action packed haunted house with laser guns. There are a lot more set pieces and quick time events which we love. It’s a lot more on rails then the previous entry, meaning you won’t really have to back track as much. Which is kinda a bummer if you can’t open any of the special loot room doors because you don’t have an extra power node. You can’t go back to that area later to open it, you’ll just have to use that node to upgrade I guess. You still find schematics and have you use workbenches when you wanna upgrade your stuff.
If you play the game right now on PC (like me), you will be bombarded in the store with free goodies. EA just lets everyone on PC unlock weapons and suites which means you can get the good guns early in the game. If you wanna progress the normal way then I guess you’ll just have to use your willpower and not click on the good weapons in the store until you feel you deserve them.
There are a lot of things I found silly about Dead Space 2. The fact that if you’re smart then the Marker imprints data on how to build one in your mind but if your stupied it just drives you mad. Some of the new necromorph designs look a little goofy to me, like the stalkers looking like Naruto-running chickens or the Ubermorph just looking like a big bug. Both the necromorphs listed had cool mechanics attached to them but nothing is scarier to me personally then a bunch of humans split open and graphed together.
Overall, I think Dead Space 2 is fine. It creates more questions than answers and it adds overly edgy and kinda silly monsters into the mix. It’s a decent sequel but honestly I feel the same way about it that I feel about Aliens. I like slow horror and silent protagonists more, and even though I love big set pieces it just didn’t do it for me like the first game. Gameplay is still peak though, Dead Space as a series is one of the best third person shooters in terms of gamefeel and no one can take that away.
Leave a reply!