I liked the first Dead Space well enough, but what I didn't like was it being billed as a survival horror game, which is a genre that I never saw it fitting into. It relied too heavily on jump scares and gore for it's "horror" and the necromorphs, while somewhat scary at first, lost their effectiveness at delivering scares after you cut down room after room filled with them. Monsters that are always in your face and die by the hundreds at your hands are simply not scary. The only legitimately scary parts of that game involved Nicole and those were few and far in-between.
Dead Space 2 is a gory third person sci-fi shooter, and a pretty good one at that, but what really makes it shine is the contrast to the original. Where the first game tried and failed to be a horror game, this one was stuck with that label and actively resisted it every step of the way. Their design philosophy seems to have been: "You think something horrifying is about to happen? Fuck that! Let's do something awesome instead."
Isaac is no longer the silent automaton who just follows orders, he is instead a human being with a personality, opinions and ideas of his own. The supporting character actually shows up more persistently and doesn't only contact you over an annoyingly screechy vidcomm, and is actually competent and capable of saving your ass if need be. There is still plenty of gratuitous gore and dark moments but without that this wouldn't exactly be a Dead Space game. The jump scares are less prevalent and the developers seem to go out of their way to raise the tension in certain scenes just so they could subvert it a moment later. I won't give specifics on that because it would consist entirely of spoilers but suffice it to say that this game likes using moments of sheer awesomeness to undercut ones with some shallow pretense of living up to the survival horror label on it's description. And, just to kill any remaining sense of fear that the game might instill, Isaac is now essentially Iron Man, with repulsor boots in his Powered Armor. How can lowly necromorphs scare you when you're playing as this guy? Just shoot em' up and move along.
A Wonderful Subversion of the Original
I liked the first Dead Space well enough, but what I didn't like was it being billed as a survival horror game, which is a genre that I never saw it fitting into. It relied too heavily on jump scares and gore for it's "horror" and the necromorphs, while somewhat scary at first, lost their effectiveness at delivering scares after you cut down room after room filled with them. Monsters that are always in your face and die by the hundreds at your hands are simply not scary. The only legitimately scary parts of that game involved Nicole and those were few and far in-between.
Dead Space 2 is a gory third person sci-fi shooter, and a pretty good one at that, but what really makes it shine is the contrast to the original. Where the first game tried and failed to be a horror game, this one was stuck with that label and actively resisted it every step of the way. Their design philosophy seems to have been: "You think something horrifying is about to happen? Fuck that! Let's do something awesome instead."
Isaac is no longer the silent automaton who just follows orders, he is instead a human being with a personality, opinions and ideas of his own. The supporting character actually shows up more persistently and doesn't only contact you over an annoyingly screechy vidcomm, and is actually competent and capable of saving your ass if need be. There is still plenty of gratuitous gore and dark moments but without that this wouldn't exactly be a Dead Space game. The jump scares are less prevalent and the developers seem to go out of their way to raise the tension in certain scenes just so they could subvert it a moment later. I won't give specifics on that because it would consist entirely of spoilers but suffice it to say that this game likes using moments of sheer awesomeness to undercut ones with some shallow pretense of living up to the survival horror label on it's description. And, just to kill any remaining sense of fear that the game might instill, Isaac is now essentially Iron Man, with repulsor boots in his Powered Armor. How can lowly necromorphs scare you when you're playing as this guy? Just shoot em' up and move along.