I’m going to start off by saying two positive things about Dead Space 3. The graphical quality lives up to the year’s standard, which developer Visceral Games hasn’t had a problem with before in this series. The other thing this game has going for it is diversity of character design. The human characters aren’t just all muscular white men - there, I said it. This is a pervasive problem in a lot of games, so seeing some different-looking people was refreshing.
But that’s about all I like about this game. Time for the criticism. I’ll try to keep it concise.
First, let’s address the elephant in the room: it’s not scary. Not at all scary. Everything about the first and seconds games that made for successful scares was removed. The environments, while lit well, all have one of the two same looks: cold and snowy-white military base, or cold and dusty gunmetal inside of the military base. The sound design is worse – there can only be so many violin shrieks followed by an alien popping out and charging at you before you don’t even react anymore. Speaking of monsters, the game takes the “used to be human” thing and leans too heavily on it to the point where the monsters are dressed in the same winter-weather space suits as the people you’re on the mission with, and the only difference at first glance is that there’s one or two too many limbs attached to the creature than there should be.
Dead Space 3 calls itself “survival horror,” but one of those words doesn’t quite belong. There’s a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I’m giving this game too hard of a time, but what else am I supposed to do? The game tries a bunch of new things to make itself different from its two predecessors, but the design and mechanic choices end up changing things up just a bit too much.
Dead Space 3 introduces a weapon crafting mechanic, where instead of finding guns and upgrading them, you find weapon parts and build your own gun. If done tactfully, it could add a fun side mission to try and make the best most powerful gun you possibly can, but the problem is that it isn’t. Instead, you find yourself looking for the gun parts first and battling the alien hoards, the reason you’re on the ice planet, second.
The game also offers side quests, a complete and utter course correction for the worst. The side quests are partly for lore, but mostly for collecting materials and parts for, you guessed it, weapons modification. You see, to intensify a situation, there’s no better way than for the player to be pressed for time. But here? Oh, let’s take precious time off our table to go take a look at this abandoned shuttle because there might be goodies abound. That’s not only a lack of tension, but a lack of immersion.
Let’s get back to the monsters, shall we? Harken back to a time where the aliens actually looked like aliens. Ah, those were the days. Now what do we get? Angry, ice pick-wielding, screaming men literally nicknamed “fodder.” How lame.
And now, the nitty gritty: the way this game treats the plot. If you’ve played or read about Dead Space before, you’re likely well-versed on the Marker-obsessed lunatics who call themselves unitologists. Unitology is the game’s cultist religion that acts as if the negative effects of the Marker (remember, necromorphs) are just all part of its plan to unify all humankind into one form. No war, no crime, no hate. Idealism to a horrifyingly irresponsible degree. In the first two games, unitologists were a peaceful, albeit in denial, portion of the population. In Dead Space 3, they’re savage lunatics, willing to stand up for what they believe in to the point of becoming suicide bombers to keep the Marker from being destroyed. You can’t just retcon that, it reeks of indecision. It’s nothing more than an attempt to make the game more exciting by changing passive antagonists into violent zealots.
This last complaint goes in line with the side quests, as in it changes a formula that didn’t need changing: Dead Space 3 offers co-op gameplay. I will admit, they had a cool idea with this one. One player is Isaac Clarke, and the other plays his gruff military counterpart named John Carver. One of the side quests has Isaac and Carver traversing the typical gunmetal gray ship, but Carver starts to lose it. On his screen, he starts seeing giant toy soldiers and party hats, confetti, cake, and all the goodies – Isaac’s screen shows none of this. Your co-op partner experiences the hallucinations and sounds crazy when they try to explain what they see and are confused when you say there’s nothing there. But there’s one problem with this: the co-op itself. Survival horror does its best job when the player is isolated, as isolation lends itself well to tension and hopelessness. When you have your friend babbling in your ear while you wander through the world, all that tension dissipates.
I won’t say much else. I’m very disappointed. Dead Space had so much going for it, it’s a shame that things had to turn out this way. There were so many opportunities, so many good ideas, and yet it ended up going down the path of becoming a clone of Call of Duty with aliens tacked on. I hope that something like this doesn’t happen again, but if it does, please let us learn from it this time.