Game Spotlight: Dead Space

Back in 2007 I bought my first game that was either published by EA or developed by one of the many studios it has devoured. That game was The Godfather: Blackhand Edition for Wii and I liked what I played despite it being from EA… and as you can probably tell, I’m not much of a fan of the company… despite this, later in 2008 I finally got my second EA game, Dead Space.

The first words you’ll hear anyone utter when you ask them about Dead Space is most likely going to be, “It’s like Resident Evil 4″… and it is for the most part, though that’s definitely not a bad thing. In fact, as you play through this game you will realise that they made it to try to do everything that Resident Evil can’t or has stopped doing recently.

Shadows and sound are the two elements Dead Space uses so damn well throughout the game. You’ll be walking cautiously down a corridor onto a mission object when all of a sudden a shadow is cast from behind you of something running by. You turn to find nothing there but the same empty corridor… and you love how the game just made you do that. You’ll have a lot of those kinds of moments in Dead Space where you’ll be keeping an eye out for things and also keeping an ear out for strange sounds. Hell, the game even goes as far as to try to take away your sense of sight by putting you into a pitch black environment or into an environment where the noise is deafening that you can’t hear the Necromorph about to stab you through the heart right behind you.

The way I describe Dead Space is that it is what you would get if you smooshed (yes, smooshed) Resident Evil 4 together with Metroid Prime. Many of the gameplay elements are present from Resident Evil as well as the whole survival horror premise, however it also borrows from the Metroid series’ ambience. It goes so far to put you inside the world of Dead Space that your HUD is in fact a holographic projection of your own suit. Now at this point I could go on about the story… but I think I’ll just leave it to a YouTube video to do that for me lol.

It seems strange to me that this game hasn’t sold very well. In fact from what I hear, it sounds like that Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles has actually sold more copies than Dead Space has.,, and RE:TUC was only released on a single platform… Wii. Why haven’t more of you gone out and bought this game? I demand an answer!

EA has made a conscious choice to try to bring this franchise to the masses by releasing various media on different platforms. While the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC gamers get to enjoy the game on their respective platforms, they’re also able to download an animated comic which focuses on the events before the game from XBLA, PSN and some gaming sites around the net. Along with this, an animated movie that is also set before the game called Dead Space: Downfall was released on DVD and Blu-ray. Wii gamers don’t miss out either with the release of Dead Space: Extraction later this year… and also the recent information that Dead Space 2 is being developed as we speak.

It seems that EA is very confident of this franchise and its ability to grow, and I hope it does… if the quality of their later works is anything like the original game then we’ll be seeing some good stuff. I hope the series can grow and evolve and I hope that more people get into it because it certainly deserves the attention.