Over the past few days I have been struggling my way through EA’s most recently copied created IP, Dead Space, for an NG review. After a thrilling and frightening first hour or so, the game began to become a bit of a chore. By the 5 hour mark I was hoping this was a minor hitch and things would soon improve, but after a couple more hours of arduous battling against the game, I’m almost at the point of giving up.

What went wrong? How did a game, praised by nearly every corner of the videogame world, drive me to this point? I’ll go into much more detail about the game in my review, but here are some bullet points describing a few ways Dead Space fails to engross or amuse and in some cases, actively frustrates me.

• When creating an innovative new HUD and menu system, make sure it’s at least as good, if not better than a traditional HUD. Dead Space’s 100% in-game HUD system looks great on paper and in videos, but sometimes becomes utterly worthless. For example, the first time a monstor latched onto me I died. Not because I didn’t “press X” fast enough, but because the “X” symbol projected out of my suit telling me what to do was out of camera shot. The game tries, yet annoyingly frequently fails, to give you the information you need.
• Spread throughout the levels are not just voice logs, but also text logs. On my standard definition screen, unless I actively sit forwards and squint, the text is unreadable, causing me to miss out on large parts of back story (I assume they’re back story, I couldn’t really work out what they were).
• On the topic of the story, could it be less inventive? I don’t want to spoil any of the two-dimensional plot, but you can probably work it all out from the following words; Space ship, “mysterious artefact”, wife, religion, monsters.
• The scary parts in the game often come from nothing happening, generating that ever growing fear that something will. The game has great sound design and often uses it to brilliant effect. The rest of the time however, you find yourself being “scared” by monsters jumping out at you at very predictable moments. After a couple of hours play, monsters and what triggers their “surprise” arrival, become entirely predictable.
• Stuff sneaking up behind you is very rarely scary. Most of the time, especially when the monster in question interrupts attacks, it’s just annoying. Imagine walking up to somebody and shoving them in the back. The person isn’t excitedly frightened, they’re pissed off at you.
• Some of the large “puzzles” take 10 or 15 minuets to complete (subtracting the time wasted by overly vague instructions and directions) and many don’t have a checkpoint at the end. A puzzle is only ever remotely fun the first time you do it. Spending 10 minuets pushing boulders around, only to be killed by a random monster the game kindly dropped on me does not make me enjoy myself more.
• For every single level, there is an end result you are trying to achieve, and for some tacked-on and contrived reason, you have to go to 3 or 4 places, kill/pick-up/activate/deactivate something, then repeat, a lot.
• The game’s bugs can kill you. This entire rant is being written after the game broke and killed me. Some doors display a quick “loading” animation before opening. Presumably to allow the large levels to be cached in parts. Apparently, the designers thought it would be a good idea to put one of these loading doors at an airlock. And it broke. Leaving me stuck, with 40 seconds of air left, staring at a door insisting that it was just about to open. To make matters worse, the next save point was on the other side.

Dead Space has an impressive polish, but it soon wears off leaving it’s repetitive core, bugs and interesting design choices on display.