After the sequel came out, I though, I’ll probably get it eventually after the price is actually reasonable. This is standard procedure for every new game I want to buy. Right now it’s $40 for Dead Space 2 on a console which is still too much for me. But when I saw a Dead Space 2 collector’s edition box set for PC for $25, I had to get it. When it rang up, the price showed up as $40 and I had to point out that it was wrong and show the cashier. He looked bewilderedly at the clear as day $24.99 price on the shelf and called the manager over for an override. Seriously though, someone must have screwed up because I came back a couple of days later and the price had been changed back to $39.99, (which is still pretty good for a box set.)
One of the first things you’ll notice about the game is that it’s really fucking dark; Doom 3 dark. A lot of the time you can’t see shit. Comparing the two games on this reveals some interesting tradeoffs.
In Doom 3 you got a bright moderately sized flashlight beam but you had to swap it out for a weapon if you wanted to be able to shoot anything, basically making you choose between being able to see the monsters and being able to shoot the monsters.
In Dead Space 2, all of your weapons have lights on them but the lights have about as much candlepower as a keychain LED. They illuminate such a small area it’s almost like looking through the scope of a rifle... for the whole damn game. Both suck but which is better? I don't know.
The off-to-the-side and over-the-shoulder views were something I actually tolerated pretty well from the previous game but in the sequel it just seems to screw you over. Being in a pitch black room with a tiny light, surrounded by enemies that are black and not being able to see anything to your left on top of that is like being fucking blind. It can take you half a minute to just locate an attacker, especially if it’s one that’s shooting at you from far away or bouncing off the walls like a spider monkey on meth.
I can count the number of times that I entered a room, saw an enemy, approached the enemy and then engaged them in combat on one hand. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the enemy in question jumps out at you from behind a corner, out of a vent, down from the ceiling, up over the railing of a platform, out of the door you’re opening in mid attack, spontaneously appears behind you with no explanation or in any number of other cheap asshole ambush tactics. There’s basically no reason, aside from running, to take your finger off of the aim button. For one, you can’t see without it. For another, you need to be ready to shoot the monsters which are constantly appearing randomly and without warning.
There are a few new weapons in the store now since the last game. One of them is actually a long range rifle which I really had to chuckle about. Please tell me at what point in this game is a single precision shot going to be preferable. I really want to know. Being able to snipe an enemy requires one of preferably two things; the enemy is unaware of your presence or the enemy is far away. This simply never EVER happens. Six enemies gang raping you in a dark corner is what happens. I can think of one time where you’re going down a tramway with those stupid little dog things that crawl on the ceiling and shoot at you where that might have been useful but even then I still couldn’t use it because I couldn’t see them and just had to keep moving around until I could trace their fire back to their location and investigate. I’m not going to take up one of my four weapon slots for this thing that I might use once.
The other weapon that mystified me was the Detonator. It’s basically just a gun that shoots or deactivates proximity mines. I think the biggest problem that I have with this is the game’s definition of “proximity mine.” It’s a bomb that explodes when someone gets too close to it. Everyone has known this since Goldeneye came out on the N64, everyone but the people that made Dead Space 2 apparently. In DS2, a proxy mine is a little canister that attaches to a surface and then shoots out a linear laser array. Should anything break the lasers, the canister explodes and somehow shoots out a linear explosion, mostly just effecting the area of the beam. So the proxy mines in DS2 aren’t so much proxy mines as they are a high tech tripwire attached to the trigger of a shotgun that you’d find mounted in a crack house. Why didn’t they just call it something more general and less misleading like a “ballistic trap?” Anyway, what I’m really getting at is that they’re useless. A device like this requires time to set up effectively and knowledge of when and where your enemy will be and as I’ve already said, this is not that kind of game. Unless you’ve memorized everything in the game, I guarantee that more often than not you’ll only be inconveniencing yourself with these things. I actually ended up selling that gun back to the store. Okay, I take it back. Perhaps they’re potentially useful against those fucking piece of shit velociraptor things. But again, I’m wasting space in my inventory with something I’m almost never going to use.
That’s right; the points are like the proximity mines in Dead Space 2.
I thought that was the end of the confusion but then I looked at the weapon descriptions in the game manual and found that it actually calls them “Detonator Mines” instead of the in game name of “Detonator” and describes them as “sensor-tripped mining charges.” Well, yeah it is sensor-tripped. Thanks for explaining that to me but how in the hell is it used for mining? Why would you mine with something that requires you to walk past it to set it off? What do they do, kill someone every time they want to use one? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they were remote detonated mines? And that’s another thing; if the weapon itself is called a Detonator, why doesn’t it DETONATE anything? And if the charges are supposed to be used for mining, why do they shoot AWAY from the surface they’re on and why don’t they EXPLODE BETTER?! It’s like two different people designed this weapon and couldn’t agree on anything.
Sometimes along your path you’ll have to go through air ducts to continue. You actually have to manually crawl through and I’m not really sure why. There are no enemies to kill inside. There are no items. There’s nothing worth seeing. There aren’t multiple paths to explore. Now going back to Doom 3, it actually had ALL those things in the air ducts. In fact F.E.A.R. did too. I guess it’s debatable whether or not the 700th mutilated corpse is worth seeing or not but it’s still SOMETHING.
Another thing I don’t get is these breakaway glass windows. If certain windows get hit, they shatter and suck everything out of the room including you unless you manage to shoot the little red button that closes the safety shutter. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a hazard or something you use strategically against enemies but if the latter is true, you might have better success just strapping a bomb to your chest and running at the necromorphs with detonator in hand.
Let’s say you blow out the window and then start getting dragged across the floor from the vacuum. Now you’re supposed to shoot the button to close the shutter before getting sucked out. I think I may have accomplished this only twice in the first play through. Trying to hit that button is like trying to thread a needle by throwing thread at it and that’s if you A: Are expecting it to happen, B: Have maneuvered into a reasonable place to pull off such a feat and C: Have a gun equipped and loaded that is even capable of activating the button. Seriously though, nine times out of ten, I’d be fighting and then the window next to me would blow out, giving me approximately half a second to orient a shot. Why is it only some windows and not others? Why does the shutter always close at the last second in order to crush you? (It’s because being stranded in space isn’t violent enough.) Why do the magnetic boots that I use for walking on the ceiling do nothing to prevent this?
Toward the end of the game, I got to a quick time event where your insane companion Stross is trying to kill you. You’re supposed to tap the action button repeatedly, just like all the other one’s where an enemy grapples you, so I did and he stabbed me in the eye with a screwdriver. I retried this segment about half a dozen times which was extremely annoying since I basically had to rediffuse the same mine field every time before I got there. The quick time event proved to be impossible which gave me the suspicion that something was wrong with the game. A few internet searches later and I found that it was a bug in the PC version and you could apparently get by it by turning off V-sync, playing in window mode and turning the resolution down to 800x600. I did all those things and it still didn’t work. I looked for a patch but the only one I found said nothing about fixing the bug. I looked some more and some people said that if you downloaded a trainer and used the slow-mo function during the scene, it would work correctly. I honestly thought this was bullshit but I was out of options so I tried it and it actually worked. Then I had a jolly good time curb stomping Stross’ head in and tossing his dismembered appendages about.
Now there’s something seriously wrong with this situation, where a video game that you pay money for has an insurmountable glitch that you have to download some random coder’s trainer to beat but the actual company that made the game leaves you high and dry.
At the end of the game was a similar quick time event that I had the same problem with but I managed to get by it much faster this time. Both of these quick time events are stupid with faulty premises. Here, how about instead of melee quick time events with characters we do this; it’s called “Use the fucking gun that’s in your fucking hand to shoot the fucker you fucking retard.” Why am I just suddenly incapable of shooting things and just letting people strangle me or whatever? The game is just constantly going out of its way to do stupid nonsensical shit so that it can shoehorn in more blood and gore. There’s a hundred ways to die in this game I think only about two of those ways don’t involve having your head and limbs torn off or being eviscerated somehow. I know one of those is running out of oxygen which you can only do if you try.
Even looting bodies is excessively violent. Monsters drop stuff when you kill them but you can also ‘search’ the bodies for additional loot. Now how do you search a body? Why by further mutilating its corpse of course. Just stomp on them and watch the loot pop right out. The limbs also fly off in all directions as if they were attached with a couple of strips of Scotch Tape.
The final boss is your treacherous bitch girlfriend from the first game. It’s extremely aggravating until you figure out how to do it. Then it takes you twenty seconds.
