Dead Space 3

While I'm a big fan of Dead Space and Dead Space 2, I feel they get overrated a little bit despite some of their glaring flaws. However, I have gained a new appreciation for their horror aspects after playing this Dead Space 3. Simply put, this feels as if Visceral Games had a gun put to their head and were asked to appeal to the Call of Duty audience and ended up making an action game instead of horror. This is apparent during the game's opening two sections which features blasting what looks like fairly normal zombies with an assault rifle, followed by a section where you blast away at fellow humans. It is not until you make it into space that the game doesn't stop reeking of a generic early 2010s shooter and feels a bit more like Dead Space.

Even when it feels more Dead Space, the fact your tearing away with your co-op partner makes it much less scary. However, I believe that this is only a small factor as other games have gotten co-op horror to work (such as Resident Evil: Revelations 2). More so, I believe it is the focus on gun customization, hunting down scraps to craft, and the overabundance of resources which leads to this. That's not to say that the gunplay and gun customization aren't amazing, but they aren't fitting for a horror game. It especially isn't fitting for a dead space game when you feel like GI Joe because you're no longer using engineering tools but shotguns, rocket launchers, and assault rifles. It also felt a little sad as it tore away at the uniqueness of dead spaces guns as I found a lot of the generic weapons to be stronger.

Similar to Dead Space 2, the game is way too easy for the genre as well. My friend and I played it on Nightmare and minus a few specific rooms we steamrolled everything that attacked us. But unlike Dead Space 2 the game has terrible pacing. As mentioned before, a terrible opening section leads into a great space section with honestly very little pacing issues. This is not until we reach the ice planet that the pacing really starts to fall apart. The optional missions are mostly all cut and paste on this planet which is a shame because the two you do in space are pretty fun. The cold mechanic is near pointless. The amount of gameplay added where you do almost nothing such as the climbing, all the pointless hacking, the pointless ladders which lead nowhere, and the time spent crafting and upgrading just make the game such a slog at times. There's good sequences hidden throughout such as the spinning blade sequence or the game's last three chapters, so it's a shame the game's package isn't more tight.

Finally, the story is a joke. The love triangle is pointless, characters ambitions are all over the place, the inclusion of Ellie negates the events which occurred with Nicole, and the one-liners just don't stick. Even the text and audio logs aren't as good, although there's still some good one's. It's even less believable because of how unbelievable the game's design is in context of how you would design thing's in the real world. It's hard to take deaths seriously when it's completely unbelievable in taking paths from point A to B.

Despite all these critiques, you should probably play Dead Space 3 if you liked the first two. It's a good shooter and it's pretty funny to laugh at. It's clearly a much weaker game it has some good ideas and gunplay which is still fun until the end. Plus I want to emphasize again how great the gun customization is. The amount of flexibility in design can lead to really cool loadouts, it just doesn't use the toolbox gameplay from the original 2 (or Resident Evil 4) very well. Also play it co-op, the special missions you get for playing co-op are fun and there's a lot of great moments that just wouldn't be as engaging in single player. It may make it less scary but like every game that betrayed the survival horror franchise, it's more fun when you forget it's horror.

I am a massive Dead Space fan. First two games are essentially perfect in my opinion. I've beaten each on the hardest difficulty at least three times, played the arcade Extraction game, have watched both movies at least a couple times, tried reading one of the books (it sucked). The lore and world design are some of my favourite in any medium.

I played the demo to this when it dropped and proceeded to avoid the game for like a year and a half. That alone speaks volumes as to how little this game satisfies the tenets of the series' excellence. When I finally got around to it, I absolutely loathed it. The colour palette is ugly as hell without the morbidity of DS1. The replacement of curated guns with crafting led to an overcomplicated and messy gameplay loop with few benefits. Every character seems written to be the stinkiest sentient turd Visceral could squeeze out of the butthole of unlikability. Though great and understated characters in 2, Isaac and Ellie become insufferable twats here, accompanied by a band of fucking dweebs who bring out the worst in them. The settings and combat encounters are nowhere near as memorable as the Ishimura or Titan Station. Last but not least, the experience is clearly meant to be had with a second player and EA/Visceral were not at all afraid of flaunting that fact in my single-player face every ten seconds.

That being said, it's got the benefit of carrying over a majority of its mechanics from 1 and 2. This means weapons still feel good, movement is a perfect balance between weighty and responsive, and the UI (aside from the ugly yellow-green shit that pops up sometimes in this one) is still the best in any third-person shooter.

First time playing this back around 2014, I easily concluded that this was a weak building established upon a strong foundation. The last few days, though, I've been revisiting it with my best friend and revealing it to in fact be a halfway-decent building built upon what had once been among the best single-player foundations of the PS3 era. Indeed, the first Dead Space had initially been designed with co-op in mind, the feature being scrapped until Visceral finally had the opportunity to return to it with 3. Unfortunately this doesn't negate the fact that regardless of old intentions, the Dead Space franchise has built itself upon great single-player experiences, using the isolation to build an immensely oppressive atmosphere and a sense of dread when needing to overcome major obstacles on your own. Dead Space 3, on the other hand, is an entertaining popcorn romp with a buddy in which you look down upon the pitiful necromorphs and play jumprope together with their bowels. This is far from the best fit for the series yet those wishing to just spend more alone time with Isaac will, functionally, have a worse playthrough than those who cave and lug jarhead Carver along for the ride.

Nine years later it's pretty hard to hold onto the frustration and disdain I used to carry for this game, in spite of how evident its many flaws remain (and remain off-putting). I now associate the game with the opportunity to fuck around with a pal in one of my favourite series, and though it robbed Dead Space fans of the opportunity for a satisfying, spiritually-authentic conclusion to the trilogy, it's a fine time all the same. Just make sure that when you're in this space, someone else can hear you scream.

The game opens up with a recap of the story of the first 2 games. Then you begin on a snow covered planet. This acts as a tutorial for the movement and a bit of shooting. Your character then gets betrayed and the time jumps 100 years to Isaac’s storyline.

Isaac is then asked to help find Ellie who is his ex-girlfriend and the woman he met in the second game. Isaac is soon attacked by a Unitology group which leads to some frantic gunfights with humans. The gameplay style is a bit weird here since you are encouraged to play it like a cover-based shooter, crouching behind cover, then fleeing. After you get past this section, the gameplay goes back to what you expect. You are then in environments that look like the mining facility Ishamura and are fighting necromorphs. There’s small corridors and lots of lifts/ladders then plenty of backtracking. Later on, you go through the snow covered areas, and necromorphs leap from the ground.

Some people say it is designed with co-op in mind. With the increased speed of monsters, it does seem that way, but the narrow corridors and ladders often make it cumbersome for 2 players. Furthermore, some cutscenes only really make sense in single player.

I’ve also seen people comment that the horror aspects have been dialled back, but there’s plenty of jump scares which was more evident early in the game. This might be because I got used to the mechanics so the jump scares were more predictable. I also only played the first few chapters single-player, then restarted and played Co-op with a friend - you can’t really have a scary, horror game when you make it co-op since it removes the feeling of isolation.

The second player plays as John Carver, who looks like a tough soldier with a scarred face. If you play single-player, then you are on your own rather than having an AI controlled partner. There’s a few optional chapters in the game, including some co-op only chapters.

The save stations are gone, and now the game autosaves at checkpoints. You would think this was to keep the game flowing, but now there’s work benches everywhere which is basically a replacement for the Store. This is where you upgrade your weapons using the new crafting mechanic. I felt the workbenches slowed the pace down, especially when your co-op partner insists on checking for upgrades or wants to try out a new weapon (this depends on who your friend is though).

There’s a large list of blueprints to craft weapons, but you can also create your own by choosing the individual parts to the guns. They have 2 firing methods - primary and secondary. So as an example, you can have a plasma cutter as a primary fire, but flamethrower as secondary if you wish. You can carry 2 weapons, and the ammunition is universal, so you are free to have whatever combinations you want. I thought the slow-firing guns aren’t effective in single-player due to the frequency and speed of the enemies.

I thought there was an abundance of ammo and med-packs so I never felt the need to craft more.

You have your Kinesis and Stasis powers as normal. Kinesis allows you to pick up and propel objects, and Stasis allows you to slow objects or enemies down. Stasis is something you will be using a lot due to the speed and frequency of enemies.

There’s a few puzzles as well as a few “hacking” minigames. Some of these play differently in co-op since they make them require cooperation. Other times one of you is using the machine whilst the other player is fending off waves of enemies.

There’s a section in the game where you need to climb up cliffs or abseil down. These feel pretty cumbersome. There’s a few anti-gravity sections but there’s not enough to warrant spending your resources on the Air upgrades. There’s a few sections, particularly near the end where you automatically fly forward and you have to dodge obstacles. These sections are pretty bland.

The graphics are decent enough but I thought the second game looks a bit more stylish.

The story is basically more of the same Dead Space really. Kill necromorphs, find the “Marker”, but also stop the Unitology leader. There’s a few story sequences that I thought were a bit silly. There’s a few moments throughout the game where Isaac and friends get captured at gunpoint by the Unitologists, but they easily escape by fighting their way out of it. There’s a character that dies because she stays on a lift whilst moaning about how much she hates lifts and wants to get off it (while others have long since left the lift). There’s a character that dies and had no chance of escaping, but there’s a twist - she escaped.

It’s a good game but it just seems to be lacking the magic that the other two games had. Both the previous games did have a lot of enemies to shoot, but I think they have upped it here. The enemy variety was much lower - with some of the classic necromorphs barely featuring. The pacing doesn’t feel as good. Co-op removes the desolation, but I think it is a harder game when played alone.

ok so I wasn't the BIGGEST fan of dead space 1, had a lot of gripes..but my god, DS3 is a disaster. what happened to the atmosphere? the PACING? MY GOD the pacing is AWFUL in this. and i played it coop!! theres way too many fucking parts where you have to stop and use your *powers* to open doors or some shit and it just slows the pacing of the game so much because everything takes FOREVER. dont forget, turn every corner and theres an elevator...elevator...elevator....the pacing is just so SHIT its so mindnumbingly boring. the combat fucking sucks, i hate every gun in the game. the crafting system is a god damn mess and i hate that too! i dont want to spend 50% of my gametime collecting resources and fucking around in some clunky console UI to make a halfway decent gun, ill just use the default gun because it WORKS and i dont CARE.

i really dislike this game. the artstyle is fucking gross. all the armor looks like power rangers or something, its just awful. i could write 100000 more words on why i think this game sucks but it just does. it reeks of badness and console design philosophies. the story is bad and i dont care. the ending was lame i barely remember it. the entire game dragged on and on and me and my coop buddy couldn't want for it to be over. fucking hell.

4/10

Dead Space is a franchise that ended up killing itself with stupid design choices and making a plot that got way too convoluted and silly. Dead Space 3 on one hand is a solid enough action shooter game with some fun moments and decent enemy design, on the other hand, its a generic sci-fi game with a shit story, bland characters, a stupid overly confusing weapon crafting system, and odd pacing. Compared to the first 2 games, this just adds nothing to the series and the fact that you fight human enemies who have guns and shoot at you is pretty stupid as well.

No game with gunplay this satisfying and flexible can really be called bad. However, Dead Space 3 is so far below its predecessor that is absolutely criminal. The story includes a laughably bad love triangle and rival partner, failing to incorporate the survival horror aesthetic until the Lovecraftian ending, and any attempt at atmosphere falls flat on its face outside the first five minutes on Aegis VII. The way universal ammo is incorporated also cheapens and misconstrues the balance of the game, and as a result of all this, despite being measurably shorter than DS2, it is way more of a slog. Only recommended for franchise completionists.