Monday, March 14, 2011

COUNTERPOINT REVIEW: Dead Space 2.

Recent photo of Lord Bling.
I wanted to take a moment and highlight another opinion of Dead Space 2. I, of course, fellated it, but not everyone on the TL;DR staff agrees. Lord Bling posted his take in the comments section of my review but I wanted to do one better and pull it out and place it in its own post.

"Well, I tried, but fuck this game. I just couldn't get into it like I did the original. The 'story' is threadbare compared to the first, and most of the twists you'll see coming a mile away. You're constantly low on ammo (even on Normal), no matter how much you buy at the Stores. For a survival horror game that throws a shit-ton of enemies at you, it's unfair to limit the ammo found in the environment. Apparently, you're supposed to use telekinesis and objects in the environment a lot more in this one, but that's quite a change from the first (where I played through it entirely with just the Plasma Cutter) and there's not enough time to coordinate all of that when you're constantly getting raped by three or four monsters. And raped you will be. Every fucking hallway sees you getting jumped and overrun, and the 3rd person perspective doesn't help when you're surrounded. And to this point, why can't your character stomp while reloading? This was never an issue in the first game, because you rarely got so outnumbered. It's an issue in multiple instances in this one. There are 'puzzles', but they're barely a diversion from the next raping you're going to get (and in many cases, you'll get attacked in the middle of solving them, which defeats the purpose). Power Nodes are sparse enough to where you'll have to pick and choose what you upgrade (and they expect you to play through it again in order to level up more than a couple of weapons and/or your rig and stasis module). Sorry dudes, but I couldn't even finish one playthrough, much less start a second.

Having said that, the voice acting is great. The audio and graphics are top-notch yet again. And a couple of strong set piece moments stand out.

Basically, Visceral tried to pull an 'Aliens' by taking the atmospheric original and going all-action, all the time, but they should've put more ammo in the game if they wanted to go that route. They also should've given us a reason to care. 

TL;DR -- Save your money and play the first one again."


3 comments:

  1. Yeah, that's me. I found a good deal on a monocle and top hat. And a tanning salon.

    I just felt that your review needed to slow its roll. :)

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  2. TL;DR - I'm too scared to play this game.

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  3. Ha! Nice.

    Actually not scared at all. The first one was scarier because they paced the creepy parts. Less is more. They threw that out the window on the sequel.

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