Dead Space 3 is a mess, a fun mess, but a mess nonetheless. This is a full action, co-op shooter with micro transactions. Dead Space 1 was eerie and more focused on the horror, Dead Space 2 was more action packed but still has that hint of unknown but Dead Space 3 laid it all out on the table. It’s hard to be spooky when explaining your big bad. For the end of the series, I was not expecting it to take the turn it took.
We still play as Isaac Clark who is living on Earth’s moon after all that has happened to him, when he is recruited by John Carver and Robert Norton to save Ellie (Clarks Ex Girlfriend) who has been trapped near a frozen planet. At the same time the Church of Unitology, currently being run by a man named Danik, decides to start triggering an outbreak of Necromorphs on the moon.
The Church Unitology worships the Markers, which are these strange alien artifacts found throughout the galaxy causing people to have psychedelic breaks, die and become Necromprphs. Strange corpse-like monsters who are supposed to be used to lead humanity to “Convergence”. This game is really a fight between Isaac and Danik for who is either going to start the Convergence or end it. Most of this game is finding out what Convergence really means in the first place.
As I have mentioned before this game is co-op. Your player 2 can be Sgt. John Carver, an extremely rude guy with problems of his own. In fact in about 2 whole side missions if you are playing as Carver you can see hallucinations that Isaac can’t see. This is a fun bit about co-op though it is extremely underutilized. While on the Carver side missions Isaac will see and hear different things than Carver. Most of what Carver will see are hallucinations about his family that give him a traumatic past but even with his past to cling to Carver still acts out of character and honestly falls short. If you play solo, though, you only play as Isaac and miss out on the Carver exclusive quests. He is definitely the heel of the game, being used to make the bad choices so Isaac looks good in the grand scheme of things. I wish your co-op partner was Ellie, it should have been Ellie. I did eventually find Carver and Isaac to be a fun pair and I grew to like him, especially in the DLC.
Ah yes the DLC lets just rip the band-aid off. I was told not to play the DLC because it ruins the end of the series and I agree but I wanted to see a crazy ship of Unitolgists rip off their limbs and tape metal to them to look more like Necormorphs. Is that too much for a girl to ask for? This is also the only time where you get an Issac exclusive hallucination, where now Carver will have to fight off Necormorphs in a small room while Issac has a psychotic breakdown. It’s a short DLC, it’s a reused ship you already did a side quest on with a small number of new enemies and one new boss. It was 10$ but honestly it’s not worth your time or money.
The gameplay is very similar to previous titles but more fast paced. You can now dive and jump around enemies with ease. You have a lot more puzzles to solve and apparently the puzzles change depending on if you’re playing solo or in co-op. They added climbing vertical slopes with a machine and it’s the worst thing Dead Space has ever done to me. Crafting is interesting; you can basically tape two guns together to create weird combos of super guns at the crafting benches. The team put some crafting blueprints in there for you to see and try out which is a cute touch. In order to craft you need resources found in the environment, most of the time you can find the items on corpses but you also have these little scavenger robots you can deploy to collect resources for you. If you want them to talk in a cute little British accent then you have to pay EA 5$ though. In order to know the best spot to put the bot there is a little noise that will play in the environment then you can play hot or cold with the sensor. You can also purchase resources with real life money, if you are insane.
They added a bunch more suits for Isaac and Carver to wear but the suits are very generic sci-fi and less Dieselpunk. You can also upgrade your suite using resources as well. They do have a sort of in game currency you can find in order to unlock loot boxes. While playing through the whole game I was only able to open 2 for free. It is hard to run out of resources so I wouldn’t worry, the game also has universal ammo so you will hardly run out of that either.
You can really tell that this is the Dead Space EA meddled the most with. It was made to be more palatable and appealing. It ended up not appealing to enough people to keep Dead Space going as a series, which is a bummer because it ends on a cliffhanger. I think this is a fun co-op game to go and have a great afternoon with a buddy but if you are a true blue Dead Space fan then I have a feeling this will be your least favorite in the series.
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