TOM FRANCIS
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Dead Space: The Right-Hand Side Of A Good Game

In it, you play a man who is unable to see anything to the left of his nose. Dead Space doesn’t make monsters appear behind you as often as Doom 3 did, but it doesn’t have to: the half who happen to be on your left are just as much of a shock. I have no idea how this camera angle was ever supposed to work.

It’s also obsessed with avoiding any kind of fixed HUD, which means you can’t see your health if you’re near a wall, you can’t see your total ammo in combat, you can’t see part of the map because your own head is in the way, and you have to take your gun out to jump – so that the game can use its LCD screen to tell you whether you’re looking at a surface you’re allowed to jump to. Given that none of these are problems you would face in reality, and assuming the point of avoiding a fixed HUD is to enhance immersion, I’m prepared to call this one a failure.

I used to be fiercely anti-HUD, but now that a few developers have done their best to do away with them, I’m a convert. I still think they can be eradicated eventually, but you’ve made your point guys: none of you are anywhere near figuring out how to do it without profoundly irritating the player. Now for God’s sake have some shame and put your HUDs back. Make them skimpy, see-through and revealing, but please put something on.

The reason it’s not the right-hand side of a bad or boring game has a lot to do with the monsters. Their concept is only a whisker away from the Generosaurus Meh – I seem to recall we’ve seen badly mutated humans once or twice before – but their more delerious design takes it to uneasy new lows. One of the most common enemies has what look like a child’s forearms protruding below its main claws.

They’d be even more unsettling if this was, as it always should have been, first-person; but you can see just about enough from your ParrotCam to powerfully want these things away from you.

But it’s not so much their look that makes them interesting or fun to fight, it’s what you can do to them. That’s always what gives enemies their ‘feel’ – we can’t really touch the stuff we fight in games, but we quickly acquire near-total knowledge of how they react to almost anything you can do to them, and that’s the way in which we come to know their consistency, resilience and structure.

In Dead Space the primary form of interaction is dismemberment: cutting, blasting or burning whole limbs off at a time, while your enemy is still alive, and then trying to figure out if it has enough functioning fleshsticks left to drag its way towards you and gnash off your own. There’s even a type of zombie that can never die, so the only consideration is how you want to prune it before you turn and run.

Oh, well here’s where this place went wrong. Gold is enormously conductive.

That makes it satisfying and grisly, and the availability of a remotely guided circular sawblade weapon makes it more so. There’s a very potent and expensive upgrade system that works well, slowmo and a Gravity Gun are thrown in almost as afterthoughts, and stepping out into the vacuum every now and then is a blast of fresh no-air – even if your movement isn’t interestingly different.

The interface and camera angle keep finding new ways to screw you over, but Dead Space scores positively on the simplest metric: I’m glad I bought it, even at a time when Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead are still new.