Isaac Clarke is your run-of-the-mill space
engineer (let’s pretend that “space engineer” is a real thing). He wears neat safety suits, plays with power
tools, and fixes stuff like power couplings, which is sci-fi speak for
“glowing, vibrating crap.” He makes a
nice wage and, more importantly, gets to travel to all the corners of the solar
system, fixing broken stuff and trying on new safety suits.
Sounds like a pretty nice life, eh?
Oh, I forgot to mention that he’s also
constantly pursued by gruesome human-alien monsters called “morphs” that have
no other goal than to vomit in his corpse, his girlfriend killed herself and
now haunts him at every step, and the person most responsible for all this
horror? Isaac Clarke.
I cut myself shaving...an alien's face off.
Such is the story as the critically-lauded
video game, Dead Space 2, kicks off.
Your character, Isaac Clarke, is stuck in a straight jacket, fleeing for
his life from abominations with very pointy limbs. These factors, and many, many more, are what
make Dead Space 2 the most frightening game ever created. Just thought I’d let you know, as this is the
Halloween season.
Still don’t believe me? Well, here’s the opening scene from the game:
Huh.
Game hasn’t even started yet, and believe me, it only gets worse. When you’re not shooting for your life,
you’re walking down eerie, deserted halls, waiting and expecting for another
monster to jump out at you. Add on the
number of hallucinations, since Clarke is pretty much ‘round the bend at this
point, and you have a gaming experience that doesn’t let you come up for
air. Players actually find themselves
thanking a higher power for cutscenes, the bane of many players’ existences,
because they give you a break from being completely petrified.
The morphs, or bad guys, that you have to
shred your way through in the game, are equally frightening, from the standard
morph with pointy limbs, to the morph that vomits acid, to the raptor-like
morphs that hide behind crates and wait for your back to be turned.
And for those of you that are thinking
“well, I’ll just shoot them in the head…that’s how you beat the bad guys in
every other game,” please do shut up.
You want to shoot a morph in the head?
Be my guest, but here’s a little surprise for you: that doesn’t
work. You shoot a morph in the head, and
it doesn’t even flinch. It comes
straight at you, neck spewing, still hell-bent on evisceration. No, in Dead Space 2, you have to shoot the
morphs in their arms and/or legs to stop them, which avid fans of shooting
games know, is pretty freaking hard to do.
Should you fail to dismember a morph, here
are all the creative ways that it will kill you. WARNING: this is extremely graphic.
And those aren’t even the most gruesome,
which I think we can all agree goes to this death. WARNING: makes previous video look like a PSA
from Pat Boone. Check out the video at about :57.
So, Dead Space 2 loves to kill you. That’s pretty clear.
Despite the obvious frustration with having
to shoot the appendages off your enemies, the tools Dead Space 2 gives you to
do this are completely innovative. First
and foremost, there are few guns in the game.
Isaac is an engineer, not a soldier, so instead of wielding some clumsy
machine gun like in virtually every other shooter, Isaac is equipped with a set
of modified power tools to get the job done.
There’s the javelin gun, which shoots a sharp electrified rod, the line
gun, which blasts out a horizontal line of searing energy to cut off your
opponents’ legs, and the ripper, which is little more than a hovering circular
saw, just to name a few. There’s also an
assault and sniper rifle, but come on, who wants to use those?
In other words, Isaac Clarke is MacGyver in
space.
The action and suspense in Dead Space 2 are
so intense, and the environment so frightening, that I can honestly say it is
one of the few games where I’ve found myself standing up, right in front of the
TV, without remembering how I got there.
Gamers need not worry about a shortening
supply of survival/horror games on the market.
Series like Silent Hill, Fear, and Resident Evil (except for maybe
Resident Evil 6, which I hear plays less like a video game and more like a
movie that thinks you don’t appreciate it enough), have all released
heart-pounding, pants-wetting experiences.
However, I think that, based on the sheer pacing, gruesome deaths, and
“you’re never safe” environment of Dead Space 2, this game takes the cake.
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