RentCavalier wrote:I have to totally disagree on this one. The game is boring, derivative, unoriginal and extremely, EXTREMELY repetative. There are about five or six total different enemy types and the majority of them look exactly the same. The difficulty is wonky and the jump scares get old fast.
Most of the enemies look the same because they are just people that have been taken over by the.... crazy thing. Other than that, each enemy is unique in how it performs in combat. They each offer a different challenge and different guns work better on different enemies depending on how you exploit their weak points (possibly for massive damage). Is it repetitive? Well, it is to some degree. The environments (except when you have to revisit some of them) are nicely varied, there are cool zero gravity and vacuum parts that spice up the game into half exploration/puzzle solving and half combat. The puzzles never really get all too clever unless you think the zero gravity parts are cool, which I didn't really. It was the cool vacuum parts that I enjoyed since the sounds were very muted in them.
The combat is based on a fairly wide range of guns that can all be upgraded and work well on certain enemy types, or in certain situations. Some guns take long recharges between shots, hold more or less bullets, have wider or narrower fields of fire. Each gun is unique and has a secondary fire function. Whether you think that is cool is entirely up to you. Then there is the stasis (slow down yer enemy) and kinesis that lets you pick things up in the environment (like enemy projectiles) and throw them at enemies. This leads to some rather inventive combat scenarios when you may need to conserve ammo. The game does shove ammo down your throat quite a bit, but if you're a bad shot then you'll need to implement a more varied approach to battle.
RentCavalier wrote:Combat, once you work out the whole "shoot the limbs" gimmick, is quite workable. It plays identically to RE4, and I mean IDENTICALLY. However, some things are done marginally worse--you don't have a pause menu, you just have this (albeit cool-looking) holographic LED thing that floats above your shoulder that integrates the menu into the game. A nice feature, but totally makes it hard to manage your inventory in the middle of deathtrap.
I also enjoyed the HUDless atmosphere of the game. I wouldn't agree that it plays identically to RE4, since I found it to be superior to even RE5 in controls. The game constantly keeps your thumbs on the analogs by letting the run button be a shoulder button. This helps IMMENSELY for navigating the environment. Playing RE5 after this game felt like going back in videogame control time. You can walk (albeit slowly) while aiming, and running and otherwise interacting with the environment while in combat was much easier. I think I went over the combat, but there are the two obvious differences with the stasis and kenisis that RE4 does not have.
The inventory. I also had a problem with it. Scrambling for a med pack in the middle of battle was a nightmare (remember our RE5 sessions Blotus? Weeyow!). I remember doing that a lot in my first playthrough, but maybe I didn't know about this or it was implemented later in a patch, but there is a button that uses a medpack. It's X and it's pretty much the most convenient thing in the world. Maybe you were trying to move things around to pick something up, but other than that there is very little to manage whilest in battle.
RentCavalier wrote:Also, the difficulty is completely chaotic. You will breeze through the first few chapters, then you'll have to deal with some really cheap new enemies/death traps (more on them later) for a few chapters, then its really easy for awhile, and then its really hard. The thing is, the difficulty isn't due to a requisite amount of skill required to pass certain obstacles. Rather, the game LITERALLY decides to, at arbitrary points, make certain things forcibly difficult. There are plenty of instant death traps, cheap two-shot kill enemies, and my least favorite, the fucking Wall Monsters That Spawn Turrets.
The only problems I had in terms of enemy deathtraps were my first encounters with those wall monsters, and those little crawly guys in the ground. I think deadspace sort of rewards you with death because there are a lot of cool death animations. I don't like dying though, so I can see where you are coming from. The little crawly guys are easily killed with either a bomb from the force gun, a mine from the line gun, the flamethrower, or the secondary fire from the contact beam. The wall monster that you so despise can also be one-hit-killed with the mine from the line gun if you place it anywhere near it when all of its tentacles are exposed. The combat rewards creative use of the weapons, and that is why I enjoyed it. Did you cut off an arm from a hulk and find it spitting extra-destructive bombs at you? Just shoot them right back at him with kenisis.
RentCavalier wrote:WMTST's are these big retarded tumor monsters that vomit up these extremely annoying stationary monsters that act as gun turrets. Each hit from their very fast projectiles stuns you, and by the time you can move again, you will likely get hit by another projectile (since WMTST's will launch two or three turrets at a time). Additionally, there's no real visual cue on how to defeat WMTST's--they aren't killed conventionally, because you can waste a whole load of ammo on them and they'll still be kicking. Most of the time, the game gives you an explosive barrel or two to throw at them, but if you don't have those, you are stuck blasting all of your heavy artillery into it as quick as possible, trying to strike a lucky nerve before you get swarmed by the turrets.
I sort of touched on an easy way to kill this guy, but you have to shoot off his tentacles to kill him. You can shoot his body all day, but he won't die. You have to find and exploit weaknesses with the tools you have. Stasis is also a great way to make a hard enemy incredibly easy.
RentCavalier wrote:Worse yet, you can't run past the WMTST because--and this is what really pisses me off--if you get within three feet of it, it will insta-kill you. WOOSH, dead, just like fucking that. In fact, the only "hard" parts of the game are when you are either swarmed with several different enemy types, or else confronted with an insta-kill trap. There are no other points--deaths are always, ALWAYS cheap, and it is done on purpose. It doesn't help that there is absolutely nothing in the game that is remotely interesting, original, or even scary.
I think you're really blowing one hit kills out of proportion. You can only be one hit killed by the "WMTST"s, and only the crawling swarms can take you down without you being able to fight back if you run right into them. All of the time you can see the threat coming. If you just charge in, you will die. Any weapon can kill any non-boss enemy.
RentCavalier wrote:The game isn't scary. Not one bit. Tense, sure, maybe. You're always wary about some enemy cheap-shotting you from behind because they are pretty good at sneaking around unheard, but once you get the Ripper, most enemies stop being a threat. The atmosphere doesn't lend itself to terror. It's loud, distracting, and certainly very dark, but not scary. The oppressive locales of Fatal Frame, Siren, or Silent Hill make you feel like you are in perpetual danger, but Dead Space doesn't. Its so by the book that you can very easily predict when and where enemy ambushes will occur. Riding a big cargo elevator for the first time? Yup, enemy ambush. Hit a switch to unlock a door? Enemy ambush. Open a door to a new area? ENEMY AMBUSH.
This is obviously just my opinion, but I found the environments in deadspace to be really cool. They looked like medical sections or hydroponics bays of the future. There was shit lying around like people lived there. It was no Bioshock in terms of feeling like it was once a thriving city, but I think the locals in deadspace were gorgeous. The environment itself I though was really tense and cool. You always felt like something was coming and that kept you in anticipation of that next battle. It's true that enemies would come out when you did things sometimes, and you sort of knew that it was coming in many occasions, but there were also moments that were really cool in how they implemented how the enemies appear.
RentCavalier wrote:The gameplay is fun, sure, and I love the variety of guns and gadgets, but after awhile, the game ceases to be fun and starts to wear on the nerves. Its loud, its very boring, and just plain unoriginal. I appreciate EA wanting to try and make new franchises to please people, but if this is their idea of "new", they should really stick to football.
Maybe it was just that I enjoyed the story and the characters, but that was enough to keep me going. I'm not going to argue that it was original, but I think that in terms of borrowing gameplay ideas from such a vast array of different sources, that it is probably the most successful in implementing them all. Heck, throw in a cover system and a vehicle level and it would have had them all: slow down time, gravity gun, third person shooting, fixed turret sections, etc. It's lame that I really like this game and want everyone to play it and you're such a vocal opponent of it.
RentCavalier wrote:Mirror's Edge, on the other hand, is much better.
erm, wut?
