Dead Space is good. It’s the right combination of event horizon, resident evil 4 and bits of other games & movies. The visuals and UI are highly polished and the gameplay is compelling. With a metacritic score hovering around 90 it’d be easy to assume that Dead Space is a great game. Unfortunately, the critical reception is just a biproduct of the steady stream of mediocrity that the gaming industry churns out. We should expect this level of polish and attention to detail from every big budget title. But Dead Space could be great if it had these four things:
- 180 Turn - I’m not sure if this was in the gamecube/ps2 versions of RE4, but one of the things that made the Wii version so amazing was how a flick of the analog stick and pressing Z turned Chris 180 degrees. In Dead Space, confronting enemies on both sides of your character often leads to pain. Simply mapping a 180 turn to the left analog ‘click’ would solve this and add more ways to surprise the player. For example, you hear something behind you and turn around to find nothing, then turn back and an enemy jumps out at you.
- Sprint toggle. I understand punishing the player for running around in a game that is based on tension but requiring the player to hold the uncomfortable right bumper to run is lame. Dead Space just needed to make that bumper a toggle (like COD4) so back tracking isn’t as painful. Plus, there is a narutal punishment for running - getting caught off guard.
- Audio Fatigue. The game’s audio is great, but it needs to be more dynamic. EARS got the RE4 style music cues right, with the suspensful music triggered on and off by enemies. Where they went a little overboard was the background noise. The constant barrage of background noise tends to distract more than it draws the player in. Take a hint from Miles Davis, silence can say more than noise.
- Rainbow Road. I talked about video game flavor in my dissection of Castle Crashers and am really pleased with World of Goo for its use of flavor. Flavor is a department where historically, most big label games lack. Dead Space does include a rather lame omage to BioShock’s plasmid adverts, otherwise I can’t detect any flavor. I’m gussing that flavor requires the following; creative freedom (hampered by lawyers), employees that don’t take things too seriously (hey, we work on fucking video games) and the trust of managers and leaders. Combine those requirements with the sophisticated technical/production requirements of making a next gen game and it’s not surprising that so few games create the perfect storm. But that is the challenge that the big companies should be trying to meet. And so, I think Dead Space would have benefited from a rainbow road style slip and slide level.
SO you have time to write about Mario Cart but not Mustang?
Posted by GEoff on October 27th, 2008.