As willfully incompetent as the Umbrella Corporation is, it doesn’t want just anyone poking around. The further you push onwards, the more taxing Resident Evil 2’s obstacles become, but from a narrative standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Despite Marvin’s initial briefing, he’s never barking in your ear. You want him to survive, and that’s what drives you to gather up all those elaborately shaped keys, that and getting to shoot zombies in the face.Ĭlaire, too, has Sherry Birkin to protect, and in both cases, you’re the one to discover the obstacles you need to overcome. This is a man who, despite being grievously wounded, puts his life on the line to save yours. Take Resident Evil 2 - as Leon, your orders are initially doled out by Lieutenant Marvin Branagh, but he’s a hugely sympathetic character compared to your Dead Space compatriots. The problem with Dead Space is that it does an exceptionally poor job of disguising that fact compared to most other titles, and it doesn’t do much for your motivation as a player or to enrich the narrative. “Hang on,” you might be thinking, “aren’t fetch quests a common fixture of many games?” You’d be right, too. Yes, you’re the ship’s engineer, but the tasks you’re force-fed could be completed by a vodka-addled chimpanzee. Do I sound bitter? Spending 10 hours discovering problem after massively inconvenient problem will do that. But in order to pump it into the ventilation system, you’re going to have to kill six poison-spewing Necromorphs, all of which are scattered over a copiously large area. They’ll inform you that, yes, you’ve spent an hour gathering the components to poison the alien biomass, so well done for that. The rush you feel at slaughtering your way to an objective and destroying or retrieving the MacGuffin is diminished by the knowledge that, any minute now, you’re going to get another call from whichever of your two surviving shipmates happens to be bleating at you from behind closed doors.
I still feel a twinge of guilt for all those closed-casket funerals I was responsible for.īut when the viscera settles, you remember that you’re locked into an apparently unending series of fetch quests. Coming down from a particularly bloody encounter, I spent the next five minutes stomping on every dead body I found, just so the Necromorphs couldn’t reanimate them.
There are so many glorious, gruesome notes of horror.įor example, forcing you to sever the Necromorphs’ limbs is a stroke of genius, not just because it shakes combat up but because you don’t have the luxury of being able to shoot “sleeping” corpses in the head. Body-jacking is just the tip of the gore-smeared iceberg.
In fact, when Dead Space gets things right, it’s absolutely sublime. Dead Space isn’t particularly pretty by today’s standards, but it’s still harrowing to see an undead Necromorph wrench your character’s head off, crawl down their neck hole, and take their decapitated corpse for a spin witnessing that in 4K will no doubt beget many a sleepless night. Granted, the game still does plenty well. That last part may seem a little harsh given all that Isaac goes through across the course of Dead Space, but it’s the one thing stopping this space-based survival horror from being a truly great game - and it’s something the upcoming remake sorely needs to fix.
Meet Isaac Clarke: engineer, marine, Necromorph killer, and hapless dogsbody to anyone with a communicator.