Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So I went ahead and finished Dead Space 2 before completing my Guild 2: Renaissance game diary. And it wasn’t because it was that good. It was because I wanted to get it over with. About half-way through the game, I discovered the oddity I’ve noticed early on was a gamebreaking bug.

Many powerful items at the automated store were priced at 0 and schematics didn’t matter because everything was available from the beginning. I found it odd at first that the weapons were all priced at 0 but ammunition cost money and dismissed it as the designers wanting to allow players to try all the weapons. In fact this was a bug introduced in a patch to introduce DLC items to the Steam version of the game and EA didn’t see fit to devote resources to make sure this didn’t break the game. I didn’t want to restart all over again so I plodded on, grimacing in displeasure all the time.

• I don’t really have to repeat the familiar simile, stated here by loyal reader Julian but I believe first written by well-known videogame writer Thierry Nguyen in his review, that this is Aliens to the first game’s Alien, but it fits perfectly. Many reviewers were pleased with this, including Nguyen, while noting that this makes the sequel very different from the original. I wasn’t.

• This game is totally a twitchy shooter, the kind in which you move around with your gunsight at eye level all the time, where you can and are expected to instantly spin 180 degrees to take out enemies behind you, where you let loose a hail of bullets at the slightest sign of enemy movement because you know you’ll be overwhelmed otherwise. Rate of fire didn’t really matter in the first game. It was all about taking measured, deliberate shots. It does here. Not that I hate twitchy shooters. But there are tons of them on the market, but few games like the first Dead Space.
• One symptom of this is that the enemies are too fast. You remember those extra twitchy necromorphs in the first game that had stasis modules incorporated into their bodies. Well, every other monster makes a return here but those don’t. You know why? Because all those slashers now move almost as fast as the twitchers. That’s why stasis now recharges automatically, right? I bet whoever made this change is also one of those heretics who prefer fast zombies to slow ones.
• Dear game designer, this game has QTE scenes aplenty. I dislike QTE scenes. Real games aren’t made out of a long string of QTEs. I get that QTEs allows you to show every bit of cinematic action that pops into your imagination while still calling it “gameplay” but if you can’t do a scene using normal game mechanics within your engine, don’t make that scene at all. You’re a game designer, not a movie director. Please don’t do that again. Thanks.

• One thing reviewers are universally down on is that the story makes no sense whatsoever. The Marker was apparently benign in the first game but it seems actively malignant now. What does the dead Nicole really want anyway? Just check out the length of this discussion in the wikia. I’m glad I’m not the only one wondering what the heck convergence is. The funny thing is Isaac Clarke is confused at the beginning of the game and he’s just as confused by the the end of the game.
• I did like that Titan station is a much more interesting place to explore than the Ishimura. The areas feel real and lived-in, with a distinct BioShock vibe (perhaps too much so, the 1950s esthetic of the storefronts feel forced). Unfortunately the writers couldn’t come up with a better reason for needing to travel through areas like a children’s creche than “our escape route goes through here” and most of the interesting bits are at the beginning of the game.

Overall, a decent shooter with very pretty visuals. And I even like zero-G now. But sorry, it doesn’t have the Dead Space magic.