Dead Space (Xbox 360)

In space, no one can hear you getting bored.
10/14/2008 7:09 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

The monsters are coming.

I know, because I can hear them. They scuttle overhead, through the air ducts. I can hear the cold tick-tick-tick of their limbs against steel. What's that up ahead? Did I just see something moving in the shadows?

Lights flicker. Corpses are littered about. In their dying moments, these dead people apparently found the strength to write helpful and not-helpful messages in blood on the walls. Someone wrote, "Cut off their limbs!" (Helpful.) Someone else wrote, "This ship is f***ed." (Not helpful, but obviously very true.) The developers do a terrific job of laying on the terror nice and thick in Dead Space's opening moments.

And then, suddenly -- boo! -- a monster appears.

It's running towards you. It looks like a man crossed with a praying mantis. You shoot off a wing, and it keeps coming. You shoot off a leg, and it crawls. You shoot off its head, and it uses its last wing to crawl towards you.

Finally, once it's dead, you think, Wait a second. Was that thing wearing pants?

Yes, some of the monsters wear pants in Dead Space. Maybe there's a monster pants store somewhere. I can picture them, trying on their ragged, gore-covered pants, saying to one another, "Do I look scary in these?"

The point here is this: Dead Space is actually frightening, before it parades out its various creatures.

By "various creatures" I mean the crawling ones. And the fat ones. And the ones that look charred, like they were on the hibachi for too long. And the little ones that wave tentacles at you, which shoot some weird darts. And the big, armor-covered ones, which are in the habit of galloping past you, conveniently exposing their unarmored backsides.

Dead Space tells the story of Isaac Clarke, one-fifth of a rescue party sent to investigate a troubled mining ship. Within the game's opening moments, the five-person rescue party is reduced to a three-person rescue party. There's a curiously bitchy woman, a bald dude and you. (You just knew those two blank-faced guys weren't going to last long.)

For the remainder of the game, bitchy woman and bald dude give you things to do. Most of these so-called "missions" feel, at best, like random excuses to get you to some far-flung part of the ship. And at worst, they feel like petty errands. "Isaac," the bitchy woman says to me, "You need to go to the cargo bay and get the gravitational centrifuge switched back on."

That's describes the majority of Dead Space's missions: Go here. Do this. Go there. Do that. Fight a few monsters. Maybe fight a boss. And pick up my dry cleaning on the way back, if you don't mind.

The game has all the classic survival horror ingredients: underpowered weapons, limited ammo and a painfully slow-moving avatar. Well, Isaac doesn't exactly move: He lumbers and lurches. Your task is to kill (or avoid, if you can lumber and lurch away) the monsters, solve the occasional rudimentary puzzle, make efficient use of the bits of ammo you have, and explore the ship, all in the name of creeping yourself out.

A massive, empty spaceship full of corpses seems like it should be fertile ground for a survival horror game. Unfortunately, I felt like I was constantly traversing the same hallways, climbing the same sets of stairs, and enduring countless wasn't-I-just-here moments. Looking at my notes, I see that I've written "FEELS LIKE I AM SPENDING A LOT OF TIME RIDING IN ELEVATORS."