Dead Space Hands On

I recently got hands on time with Dead Space at this year’s GCA convention in Singapore. While I didn’t experience much of the game, it was enough to get an idea for how the basic controls work, and what the highly touted atmosphere was like.

Dead Space is played from a close third person perspective that’s all the rage at the moment – imagine something like Gears of War and you’ll be on the right track. Another feature in the game that’s also popular is the HUDless display. There are no health bars, ammo counters, or other bits of info tacked onto the screen – rather, a tube on your character’s back shows how much health they have left, and as you fire your weapon, it’ll display its ammo count on its own little screen. It’s all in the name of drawing you into the experience, something that Dead Space seems to be quite good at.

You play the role of an engineer on a ship that now seems to be infested with aliens. But this is shaping up to be just as much a survival horror game as it is an action game. Pacing and mood feel like very important elements here – something that was obvious even as Radiohead’s “Creep” was blasted out on Rock Band to my immediate right. Actually, maybe it was appropriate?

The ship’s dirty interiors actually reminded me a bit of Doom 3, as did some of the roaming gameplay as you unlocked doors and activated machinery. You’ll even get your own version of the gravity guns found in Doom 3’s expansion and in Half Life 2.

The game’s mature rating become obvious when you start seeing rather mutilated bodies lying all over the show – and if you’re the sadistic type, you can mutilate them further. Unfortunately, I didn’t play enough to run into the mutilatees, as it were, although there were some disturbing cutscenes involving people who just barely managed to speak to you, before slumping over other bodies. The story looks set to be pretty frightening and unsettling if pulled off correctly, and EA seem to be emphasizing it as a major draw card.

So from what I saw, they seem to be on the right track. But how the combat holds up, and whether the developers can avoid the repetition problem that plagued horror shooters like Doom 3, will determine whether Dead Space is worth your time.