Dead Space: Addendum

I haven't gotten through these as quickly as I wanted to (I, uh, got distracted and started playing a few other games recently) but I recently worked my way through a number of Dead Space spinoffs and was surprised by how much I enjoyed them.

Dead Space: Downfall

This movie is actually pretty decent. It loosely covers the events of the Ishimura immediately prior to the start of the first game and it was cool to see characters pass through a few locations I recognized. I feel like a lot of this movie's appeal is in its shock value and gore so if you want some gnarly violence this has quite a bit of that.

The story is interesting as it, for the most part, shows you things that you were already (probably) aware of due to audio and text logs. I feel like it's not a perfect retelling (the captain's death, for example, happens somewhat differently in this than in the video Isaac saw) but it's close enough that you can handwave away any differences. It also introduces a concept that the game itself doesn't run with, which is that necromorphs will stay ten (or more) feet away from the Marker at all times. In the game they still swarm you, but that's a pretty neat idea that I wish they'd actually somehow included in the game.

I also think it's worth pointing out that the main character of this has a very cool jacket.

Dead Space Extraction

Beginning of Extraction

Extraction also loosely covers the events prior to the first game, though this game starts on Aegis VII. The structure of the game is, effectively, a mirror image of the original and for the entirety of the game I'd be recognizing locations and I found that all very cool. You can tell the assets are a bit lower-quality because this needed to be a Wii game but the novelty of walking through corridors and locations that appear to be one-to-one recreations of places from the main game never got old for me.

End of Dead Space

This may be an on-rails shooter rather than a full third-person action game but Dead Space's combat translates remarkably well to that new perspective. Necromorphs are still best handled by shooting their limbs off and doing that with motion controls came pretty naturally. Similar to Isaac, you have a choice of four weapons you can swap between and I frequently had to do so in the middle of combat encounters because I didn't want to waste time reloading. There's an active-reload mechanic in here, something I didn't realize until far too late in the game, and messing that up when you're getting swarmed really does make this feel as tense and desperate as the original game, for a time at least.

Dead Space Ignition

Ignition was, well, less good than those other two. It's effectively a motion comic stitched together with some hacking minigames, and while some of those minigames are enjoyable it wasn't really all that interesting. You have three types of minigames: a sort-of reverse tower defense game, a puzzle where you need to use mirrors to reflect lasers into various goals, and an obstacle course/platforming thing. Those first two activities in here are engaging enough, but that third racing game thing always felt clumsy. You're meant to dodge barriers and traps set out in front of you but you can't see far enough ahead or move quickly enough to ever really do that consistently, so every level of these is filled with tons of awkward collisions and never looks particularly graceful. To make things worse, the camera frequently spins around for some reason (and thus changes your controls?) so even if you are getting better at it you're fighting with the shifting controls.

I truly Did Not Like these specific challenges

I also thought the story was a bit lackluster. It's cool to get a tour of the Sprawl (given that, I assume, Isaac will be visiting many of those same locations in Dead Space 2) but its two protagonists are wisecracking and making jokes that don't really seem to fit the tone of the other Dead Space stuff I'd experienced. Maybe Dead Space 2 as a whole is more laissez-faire about all this, but I kind of liked that Extraction and the two movies were pretty straight horror stories where people never really got too comfortable.

 The fact that this a direct lead-in to Dead Space 2 is pretty neat however.

Dead Space: Aftermath

I went into this thinking it wouldn't be great (the Internet doesn't seem to like it much) but I thought it was decent, animation quality aside. Like Downfall it's got a lot of gore and shock value but while that movie at least looked decent, this one is far less consistent. It opens with some real dodgy CG (think Hot Wheels: World Race) and occasionally switches to more traditional 2D animation (that's also not very good). There also isn't a whole lot of consistency to character and environment designs between the various art styles which makes the gimmick of switching between aesthetics feel a bit half-baked.

You'll spend about half of your time staring at CG people that look like this

Visuals aren't everything, of course, and the story that is here adds to the world of Dead Space in some neat ways to still make this potentially worth seeing. There are elements that (I presume) bridge the gap a bit between the first and second games and the structure of this, while a bit rough in its execution, is novel enough.

Overall this isn't bad, the story's a decent followup to Dead Space, but the visuals were definitely distracting.

Though not as distracting as the thought of someone playing Dante's Inferno in the far, far future

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All in all this was a fun experience. While Ignition and Aftermath can probably be skipped, I thought Downfall and Extraction were genuinely good installments to this series and they each could stand on their own merits. As spinoffs, however, they work together to complement the base game and while there are some inconsistencies it's cool to see a more complete picture of the events that went down on the Ishimura.

In some ways I'm reminded of those Half-Life spinoffs I played last year, Blue Shift and Opposing Force. Sure, they're not necessarily reinventing any wheels but you're seeing new people running around the same locations as The Main Character to help flesh out the world a bit more.

I played the opening chapter or two of Dead Space 2 a few years ago but never made it beyond that, so I'm looking forward to starting that soon to finally see whether or not it's as good as everyone says it is.