More Zombies, In Space! - The Games I've Played

We had Resident Evil, which was supposed to be a survival horror game, and it wasn't so much survival and not exactly horrifying.

Then we had Dead Rising, which killed a lot of zombies, but wasn't what you'd expect when you think about zombie infestation.

Finally, there was Dead Space. The shocking part about this game- I didn't buy it, Alicia got it for me.

Dead Space is a freaky, jump out of your skin, sort of game. It's survival horror, how survival horror needs to feel. You never feel safe, you're constantly looking for anything that might keep you alive or a handful of ammo so that you can fight things off, and the monsters, oh the monsters are amazing.

Unlike your typical zombies, a shot in the head don't slow these guys down, you have to chop off their limbs. The best part about them you chop off their legs, they still crawl towards you, you chop off their arms, they're still running. These monsters take a beating, and still keep running straight at you ready to rip your head off. They might not be the most diverse of monsters within the game, but you are afraid of them whenever they show up and try to eat you alive.

Then there comes the amazing HUD within the game. First off, there's no way to pause. If you go into a map menu, or anything like that, the game is still going on around you. That means that if you're stupid and check your gear in the wrong place, you can get attacked midway through checking which way you're supposed to go. Everything is shown in a holographic display in front of you, and that's even how you can see your ammo count on whatever weapon you're using, and instead of a health bar randomly put in a corner, it's built into your suit so you can see exactly where you stand, and it makes sense within the world.

Then there is the main character. He is part of the reason that it makes sense, and the game isn't as bad as some of the others within the genre. The thing about Issac is that he's normal.

He doesn't have arms the size of my waist, his head is normally sized, he doesn't have any special characteristics, he doesn't have gun training, he doesn't have a secret military background, he's just a normal engineer stuck in a really bad situation. And on that note, he doesn't have typical guns. He's stuck with whatever he can find in the ship that he's stuck on. You don't get your handgun and rocket launcher, you get construction tools like a plasma cutter, and a hacksaw that Issac decides to make some modifications to to work as space zombie dismemberment devices.

The environment is spot on, the pacing is amazing, the story line is a bit confusing but makes sense at the end of the day, and it is (most importantly) scary. It doesn't have anything that it doesn't need, and what it does have works perfectly for the game. It also didn't help that the majority of my time playing this (and all of my other games) is that I play it typically very late at night when people are asleep. Although the later games within the series sold out just a bit, the start of the series started with a bang and deserves a playthrough for anyone even slightly interested in survival horror games because it's a good restart of a new series with a fresh look at the genre.