While both games had a plethora of death-dealing industrial equipment, the dismemberment mechanic and a general shortage of ammunition forced most players to make the safe choices and go with the default plasma cutter and one or two other specific use-case tools. The new weapon crafting system urges a sense of experimentation that Dead Space and Dead Space 2 actively avoided. These stories, told via text and audio logs throughout each area, tend to feature specific characters repeatedly in a successful effort in developing these long-dead people enough to want to know what happened to them. Each new place in Dead Space 3 - whether it's the wreckage of a ship orbiting Tau Volantis or a basement storage compound on the planet's surface - has some new, awful history waiting to be unraveled. Dead Space 3 focuses less on specific setpiece moments than its predecessors and instead spends time telling stories via its environment. The Ishimura and the Sprawl were great environments with bits of visual narrative. Visceral makes up that ground with a much more interesting game world. But for most of the game, there was a real sense that I'd seen all of them before. There's a new aesthetic sensibility, sure - most of the necromorphs Isaac faces throughout Dead Space 3 are based on creatures that have been dead for more than two centuries, rather than fresh corpses. There isn't the same sense of spectacle and fanfare to each new enemy type's introduction, and it's hard to escape a sense of familiarity for players who survived the first two games. The game actually suffers in this regard compared to Dead Space and Dead Space 2. Visceral frequently gives in to the kitchen sink approach, throwing what feels like everything in its repertoire at the player. Combat is more immediately satisfying than it's ever been because of this, which is good, since managing multiple on-screen enemies is more important than it's ever been. The dismemberment-oriented combat is paired with stasis, which slows enemies and environmental hazards, and kinesis, which allows Isaac to grab objects and fling them at enemies with deadly force.ĭead Space 3 further refines this combat trio with more responsive controls and better shooting than the last two games. Each enemy type is vulnerable in a different way, and Dead Space 3 introduces new wrinkles to that equation over the course of its 18- to 20-hour campaign. The undead necromorphs don't have traditional anatomical weaknesses - instead, Isaac must cut off their limbs to take them down. In keeping with the last two games, Dead Space 3 is a third-person action-horror game with a specific mechanical twist. And at the center of Isaac's search lies Ellie, a fellow survivor - and more to Isaac - who led an expedition to Tau Volantis that's gone silent. Isaac is pulled from his hole to help find the origin of the Marker's powerful signal on the forgotten iceball Tau Volantis, but he's on borrowed time - the Marker-inspired religious cult of Unitology has declared Isaac a heretic condemned to death. It's also the biggest, most ambitious game Visceral has ever made.īut Visceral's biggest accomplishment is attaining what I thought was impossible - Dead Space 3 avoids the traps of poorly implemented co-op, while capitalizing on all of its strengths.ĭead Space 3 opens with series protagonist Isaac Clarke in hiding, as he tries to forget the horrors of the Marker, an alien artifact that causes insanity and, later, an awful post-mortem mutation called necromorphism. Surprisingly, instead of watering the series down, Visceral has instead strengthened Dead Space's single-player roots with some of the strongest combat design the series has seen. If Visceral could miscalculate the basic appeal of its own series so badly, what did that mean for the rest of the game? And how could it put in the work to make a great sequel to the previous games, distracted by co-op? When it announced last year that Dead Space 3 would see the introduction of co-op to the series for the first time, it seemed like Visceral was losing sight of what made the series special - much like Dead Space 2's well-meaning but ultimately forgettable competitive multiplayer mode. Visceral has built Dead Space around a solitary, terrifying campaign experience. Dead Space 3 represents a precarious moment for developer Visceral Games.
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