Even if you’ve no interest whatsoever in playing Dead Space – which is reasonable, because it’s a grey-brown sci-fi corridor shooter – you owe it to yourself to at least try one thing out. Find someone who has it or whatever – it only takes about half a second. Just fire up the game, make sure you aren’t aiming at anything, and then tap the spacebar.
Did you hear that? Hruuugh WHUMP. A determined, desperate war-grunt, followed by the always-satisfying sound of a half tonne boot slamming down onto the steel deckplate. Try it again on an enemy and instead you’ll hear rotten flesh exploding, with a truly repulsive liquid sucking sound. Without question, Dead Space has the best feet in gaming, easily wrenching the crown from Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, in much the same way that a space engineer occasionally has to wrench dead flesh from his face and bash it repeatedly with a mining laser.
The space engineer in question is one Isaac Clarke, whose name is unfortunate only because it means someone at EA Redwood Shores decided against Arthur C Asimov, which would have been approximately a thousand times better. Isaac is the generic-est of a small crew of generics investigating what’s going down aboard the USG Ishimura, a ‘planet cracker’ spaceship that has been rather quiet of late. Let’s not mince words when we could be mincing monsters: the ship is crawling with weird fleshy things with horrible mouths and big spiky limbs that have been munching their way across the ship for some time when Isaac finally places one house-sized boot down onto the bloodstained decks of the Ishimura, probably crushing a skull in the process.
Save for its innovative use of stomping on things, Dead Space’s main unique selling point is the fantastic-sounding ’strategic dismemberment’; your enemies, you see, are monsters, and not the kind of monster that can be easily disposed of with a quick shot to the head. That usually just pisses them off more, and these are monsters that were already phenomenally pissed off . Instead, you have to slice them and dice them, soliciting fountains of gore and some truly unpleasant sound effects, before finishing off the legless maniacs with a few quick, bone-shattering stomps to the arms or shoulders (or, if you’re boring, shooting them some more). It’s a clever mechanic: in games like Dead Space, which trade so extensively in the shock appearance of enemies from vents and … well, just vents, the player will practically always just spray thoughtlessly with whatever weapon they’re currently clutching when a pile of dead tissue crashes down upon them. Dead Space forces you to aim – there’s no reticule without holding the right mouse button – and select which limb offends you the most before you fire. If you don’t aim and bring up the reticule, then tapping the fire button makes Isaac execute a flailing melee attack, swinging his gun around in an insane arc in his desperation to keep the horrors away from him.
Isaac is horribly mistreated throughout Dead Space. It’s not a particularly difficult game, but over the course of my playthrough he was blown up into a shower of red meat, burnt to death, dragged flailing into a tentacle’s lair, sliced in half, torn to shreds by asteroids, and had his head eaten. Dead Space, in my experience, has the best deaths since Crash Bandicoot 2, and in terms of sheer horrifying gore it outdoes even that. This is a game of gore, and it makes no attempt to hide it. Despite its reliance on precision aiming in combat, Dead Space is, in many respects, more blunt force than scalpel subtlety: the enemies are mindless bags of viscera, the story is meaningless, the characters are instantly forgettable, and Isaac’s progression through the ship is strictly linear, though the brilliantly atmospheric vacuum and zero-gravity bits break things up nicely.
However, in those places where it is more subtle, Dead Space excels; and almost all of them are centred around Isaac himself. I couldn’t care less about the missing girlfriend that may or may not be still wandering the Ishimura, but I do feel a certain sympathy for Isaac the beleagured space engineer. He never says anything, but he’s the least mute mute protagonist since Gordon Freeman last winced his way through a fire: Isaac screams, he grunts, he moans, and – best of all - his breath becomes laboured and rattley as his health drops down into the red. Academically, Dead Space shows you Isaac’s current health on a segmented meter along his spine, as part of its moderately successful crusade against the HUD, but really Isaac’s ill-health is displayed to you by his desperate, lurching limp, his painful breathing and groaning, the way he looks like he’s always about to collapse when you force him to run. I symapthise with the man because, God, he goes through some shit. At the end of the game, he was knackered, and so was I.
Dead Space is not, exactly, fun to play. The game has some rudimentary RPG elements – you can buy new stuff from a holo-shop, and power up weapons, armour and abilities – and as you progress and get more powerful, there’s a certain primal thrill to be had from carving your way through everything in your path, leaving nothing but oddly resilient torsos in your wake. The game even lets you start a new playthrough with all your fully levelled up gear, though only if you’re playing on the same difficulty as before, which further enhances the I-Am-Become-Death feeling that I’m so fond of in RPGs. But, seriously, fighting your way through a derelict spaceship crawling with malevolent and terrifying looking creatures, stumbling over eviscerated corpses every couple of steps, watching your avatar get torn apart by organic blades; it’s pretty bloody unpleasant. But who said all games had to be fun? Dead Space is a shattering, nerve-tearing experience within a horrendous world, full of unpleasantly atmospheric touches, and that’s what makes it worthwhile, even amongst last autumn’s deluge of quality. And that seriously isn’t bad for a grey-brown sci-fi corridor shooter.
