In space, ships are made of grey with splashes of Red

The first thing that stood out about this game, especially after playing Mass Effect 2, is how wonderfully quick the saving and loading is. Seriously! I was like wow, it saved that fast? Loads up that quick? It's delightful. The weird thing, I mean, is that this actually seems really important to a horror game. If the game had long loading screens you'd end up like ME2, where I often accidentally misclicked after tabbing back into the game.

The second thing is holy cow is that ever a ton of blood. I mean there is blood everywhere, on everything. There's more blood than there is much of anything else. It starts to completely lose impact, as blood doesn't really indicate violence coming to you. It just looks like you're actually on some deep space raspberry jam factory ship.

The blood and its over-abundance sort of defines the main thematic thrust of the game. It is horror executed through absolutes. It's not violent, it's ultra violent. There is little in the way of pacing, little in the way of slow build up in encounters. Shit goes bad quickly and then it just blasts it in your face. The game is a fire hose of gore, violence and blood to the point it's a weird mix of comical and gross, but not really horror.

What confused me at first is the fact the game does in fact understood horror. There are bits where it is decidedly creepy and atmospheric, with some really nice attention to detail. Little tricks of the lighting and odd well placed sounds that tickle you just the right way. Then some corpse smashes its skull against a pipe and all atmosphere is instantly lost. I think the end conclusion is they simply firehosed the game with absolutely everything: ultra violence, atmosphere, weird sci-fi ideas, blood, gore and every spooky anything they'd ever seen.

I've heard of the great outdoors but this is

The sci-fi elements are surprisingly a step above my expectations. I'm not necessarily saying that the game spews chemistry and physics at you, but sci-fi concepts like cloning labs, zero gravity and air production at least show an interest in outlandish concepts. It does, on some level, feel like some fifty year old crappy spaceship would perhaps feel. Or at least feels like someone sat down and thought about the possibilities - There is a serious attempt at world building. The storyline angle world building is mediocre, but the ship itself is truly awesome.

So then we move onto the "game" in and of itself. Gameplay is pretty simple stuff: You're an engineer, you shoot the monsters du jour with various weapons that actually feel like less than military hardware. Gunplay is pretty accurate and monsters feel tense without being overwhelming. The game is generally pretty fair about combat in a way I like - I find myself looking around and wondering where the freshly arrived enemies are, but usually they don't go for me before I get a chance to find them. It seems weird to complain about this, but going into a "horror game" you expect a ton of cheap ass bullshit. The game is mostly well paced and fair in that regard, at least on normal. I did say mostly - There's some crap, especially in zero gravity environments, but also awkward 'lockdown' scenes where you're jammed into a closet.

Enemies remain scary, even though they're not much of a threat in the true sense of the word. They're at least dangerous enough that you pay attention to them, though scary in this context may not be quite the correct word. Combat is surprisingly interactive, as you need to aim to remove limbs, not just body and head shots. You don't just find the target and hold down fire, but quickly move to tear it to pieces.

Puzzles, unfortunately, vary between interesting and totally boring. One of the issues I have with the game is that save points, as a rule, should always come before and after puzzles that take a couple minutes to solve. I mean literally the save point should be right there. It's all well and good to have checkpointesque system, and I can live with that, but several of the larger puzzles have combat in and around them. That's irritating. More frustrating is the fact that the game basically loses its stride in regards to puzzles, eventually just using them to burn time. The crate shit at the end is beyond obnoxious. I honestly don't understand the purpose of boring me to death (ha) with moving boxes around or fetch quests.

The storyline is ... I don't know. I started to pick up that there were going to be derpier elements as I went. The game didn't go outright berserk with them, rather it keeps much of it pretty low key, but there's some definite macguffin action to try to tie things together.  There's an especially odd moment where one of the cast just ... Screws you over. For reasons I'm largely not altogether too sure, other than the needs of the narrative, really work. The macguffin itself is at least given a sense of, if not personality, then at least a certain feeling of inevitability that governs its "actions" in the game. The subtle difference between a plot object that people just do things crazy like around, and a plot object that drives people crazy to do things around for it, is enough that the story never really catches itself too harshly.

There's a couple other elements that felt bent in to feed the needs of the narrative. I've mentioned the game just has too much blood, but it also has too many corpses. Now this may sound odd, but the game implies that the necromorphs are made from the dead, very actively at that. And yet there's just random bodies and bits all over, just to add to the gore factor. Thing is, those bodies should just be necromorphs, not gorish decorations. Also you're generally supposed to smash bodies, which is just more hassle and chore added in. There's also way too many of the "baby" necromorphs - which do actually have an explanation in game for existance, but they make up like half the necromorph population in game.

This wouldn't bother me if they weren't more or less a chore to deal with.

The other thing that becomes such a chore is the audio. Now, I understand the idea that you want spooky sounds in a horror game, but Dead Space's audio direction is just goofy nonsense. About halfway through the game, I just muted it. That's really bad. The big problem here is that yes, a horror game should have spooky and tense sounds, but after a while you just get sick of all the goofy noises the game constantly makes. It's just constant grinding, irritating slop bucket noises, off key chanting and Isaac panting just to fill dead air. It's entirely fine for a horror game to ease up and just have normal sounds for a while, you know?

there's a hole in your plan

So in summary: A largely good and interesting game, bogged down by overwhelming audio direction, puzzles that slip into terrible and way too much pointless gore. The boss fights especially where mostly neat, though the end of the game (past about chapter 9) just turned into a monstrous chore. I get that you need a macguffin to justify all this gore, but seriously, I shouldn't spend multiple hours of my life pushing the fucking thing around. If I were to assess the game by its ending, I would actually call it "terrible" but that's probably a little unfair.

Though seriously, pushing a crate around? Like, seriously? What the fuck is wrong with a development team that honestly thinks a human being wants to spend more than an hour of their life pushing around a box, clearing the way for a box, pushing the box some more, so on?

The last boss, though, was pretty good. Neat and epic. Ended the game on a far better note than I was expecting. The boss fights really were, on the most part, the stand out elements of the game.