Dead Space

The build-up to Dead Space has been a bit of a rollercoaster (albeit a very gentle one) for me. Despite my better judgement, the teaser trailer (all very generic Event Horizon-y) really interested me. A survival horror set in deep space? Yeah, sign me up!

Then the other trailers and previews made it look more like a standard Doom-style FPS, which is really not something I’m too enamoured of at the best of times, so my interest duly waned. And then I learned about the tie-ins: a comic and Dead Space: Downfall, a feature-length animated movie which ties in with the game, and I was interested again.

Then I read Eurogamer’s less than glowing review of the game, and once again my level of interest dropped. In a nutshell, Eurogamer’s stance seems to be “It looks good, and shooting things is satisfying, but the gameplay’s only just up to standard and it’s artificially lengthened and really it’s just a shooter rather than a survival horror.” And as all of those are Bad Things in my book, when I read the review, you could colour me ‘meh’.

But then I watched the 1Up Show (which features some remarkably impassioned defence of Dead Space, along with some pretty-looking footage) and read the 1Up review of the game, which mentions the same points as Eurogamer, but sees them defferently. After the show and the review, I was upbeat again.

But then…. Then I watched Dead Space: Downfall (I’m reviewing it for Videovista this month) and it’s turned me off the whole enterprise again. The film is designed to be ‘mature’ in the way that appeals to 14-year-old boys. There’s blood and bad language, and plenty of both, used gratuitously and often unnecessarily. But the interesting parts of the Dead Space world are barely touched on (and I’m almost certain they’ll be ignored completely in the game): the planet-destroying mining industry, the religious movement that opposes it and the way these fit into the wider context of humanity expanding through the cosmos.

Only time will tell though. Dead Space is out on Friday (October 24th) and I’ll be grabbing a rental copy as soon as I can, so that I can write a properly-researched review of the film. Expect an update then.