Dead Space 3 Review

Dead Space 3 Reviewed:

            EA and Visceral are back with their latest installment of their infamous Dead Space series: Dead Space 3. Personally, I was disappointed on some fronts and really freaking impressed on some.

            Presentation:

            I believe the games menus are sleek and its title screen animations are cool, but the game’s cores just often feel incomplete or dare I say it… rather shitty!

            The voice acting often looks stupid with the lack of mouth movements that often feel out of place, but no no no, it’s not the lip syncing that makes it a helpless case, it’s the fact that the voice actors often feel like the kinda speak in monotone and often they just don’t do the job right…

            The sound effects in between a firefight are perfect with some ambient noice and a nice thumping sort of beat allowing the user to feel the pressure, and more often than not EA and Visceral attempt to make the SFX and music a little scary to add to the whole scary concept in dead space. While DS3 hits the nail on the head with the music and SFX itself, they fall flat on their face with its timing. I often saw myself predicting an enemy coming behind me as the music prematurely played as the necromorphs entered the battlefield, this often made the game less scary and predictable.

            The story is decent but to the average, non-anry joes, the story feels exactly like this: necromorphs… Isaac… guns…suit… world… explosion… tau volantis? To put it in a nutshell, Ds3 could have done a far better job with emphasizing the story by telling it better or at least a little properly.

            Gameplay:

            This is something EA has absolutely nailed on the head. The controls are pretty easy to follow and always work smoothly and provide one of the most responsive feels in any game ever. Furthermore, the game’s core mechanics are solid and simple things like reloading and shooting… JUST.SEEM.SO.COOL.  Besides what’s mentioned above, there are other things that make playing dead space 3 an unique, one of a kind experience.

           

            Gun Crafting:

One of the most fun things in this game is the fact that you can craft and customize weapons… and of course you do this using resources you scavenge from the bodies of dead necromorphs… duh? Gun Crafting is all done on things known as benches; personally, I think that the layout and interface of the bench was smooth, easy to understand, fun to use and lastly, opportunities were endless. Personally, I prefer a single shot sub machine gun with a semi automatic under weapon with a upper tool firing explosive canisters.

            Suit Customization:

            All the suits are purely aesthetic in this game, suit customization isn’t! Customizing suits is also a truckload of fun, as the user can upgrade things like kinesis, stasis, health, armor, oxygen levels, bladder fullness, ping pong ability and so much more… (okay, maybe not the bladder and the ping pong bit.) And of course this is all done using the resources you scavenge from the body of dead necromorphs. In conclusion, suit customization is quite cool, but the fact that suits didn’t have special abilities and were purely aesthetic was quite disappointing.

            Kinesis:

            To make the concept of Kinesis simple, the Kinesis ability is sort of like having the force, but a whole lot weaker, basically like the force’s little sister. The Kinesis ability can’t help but feel slightly weak to me at sometimes as you can’t pick enemies up and can’t do anything to them mid-air. What you can do is things like: hit necromorphs with the limbs of other dead necromorphs… (note* this is an awkward sort of thing I like to do…) Other things the Kinesis ability can do are: picking up crates and throwing them, opening doors, spinning rotaries and other stupid things that involves picking things up and chucking it at people or spinning something.  Psh?

            Stasis:

            To make the concept of Stasis simple, it is pretty much slowing shit down so you can attack something easier, flank something and lastly so you can teabag a dead enemy while other enemies helplessly approach you in slow-mo. ( note* this is an other awkward sort of thing I like to do…) And unlike the stupidly useless Kinesis, Stasis doesn’t feel overpowered or underpowered… actually, I believe it is just right like the amount of words in my beats pro review. Teehee.

            Graphics:

            Wow. The game looks beautiful… I often can’t help myself from stopping and staring at the beautiful mess known as Tau Volantis, and the fact that sceneries are on such a grand scale allows me to appreciate the surroundings in Ds3 even more.

While the sceneries are scintillatingly stunning, the close ups often feel cheap and patchy... The faces often look like absolute garbage, but as I am a nice person, I completely understand this ; because during most of the game you are behind the LEDs of your suit’s helmet.

Lastly, the thing that amazes me the most is… that this game looks stunning on consoles too and isn’t too demanding for PCs and works smoothly and in all it’s glory on Direct X9.

Campaign:

I quite enjoy killing necromorphs and frankly, I think I do it rather well, but, at the same time, I enjoy a well-told story. While I absolutely love the gunfights and the mechanics of the game, I never really understood if Visceral as going for action or horror, this was sort of a turn off. Predominantly because the reason I bought DeadSpace was to experience the same scarily-awesome experience like DeadSpace 1 and Deadspace 2, and sure I let out some wild WTFs when I started up my single player experience, but after a while, the game made me feel like I was doing too much of the same stuff, I often felt I was being overworked, and lastly I never really got the scares I was wishing for, all I got was some pretty predictable enemies charging my way every 2 minutes or so.

The next major issue I have with DeadSpace 3 is that the cutscenes are randomly placed all over the show as the game tries to keep the gamer interested with what they call a storyline. This is both frustrating and really annoying as it often just kills my momentum and completely gets me out of the zone. Also wrapped into this terrible mess of a story is a loosely related sort of love triangle. Seriously?

Although, while the campaign is unimpressive, the second half of the game in Tau Volantis is probably it’s saving grace. With scenes that are a little more action packed and areas that aren’t as dreadful... but they still aren’t as good as those in DeadSpace 1 and 2.

Simply put, DeadSpace3 has a monotonous and reasonably fun campaign with a vaguely told, sort of decent story.

Co-op:

Yes, this game has no competitive multiplayer with teamdeathmatch, domination, free for all and whatever the hell. Although, what it does have is a interesting co-op campaign that has fresh ideas, incorporates the need of co operation and really makes you feel like you are part of a team... although the story is still terrible with those random god damn cutscenes.

Conclusion:

To me, playing dead space 3 means a bag of mixed emotions, because I absolutely love the gameplay and its little nuances that make the game special, but at the same time, the story is absolute horseass, the missions feel monotonous, laborious and the fire fights tend to be really freaking repetitive. Gosh, I don’t know how I should feel.

Presentation: 4

Gameplay: 10

Graphics: 9

Campaign: 3

Co-op: 6.5

Total Score- 65%- D+