Sorry, but I’m about halfway through Deadspace and I felt the need to share this opinion.
So I’ve been playing Deadspace a little this week. It’s an interesting game, just feels a little, I dunno, mislabeled? It’s just not really scary to me; I mean, in the first opening scene, before you even have a weapon, you are chased down a corridor with a monster’s tentacles trying to drag you down. This was kind of scary, but after this scene it just hasn’t been scary to me. It’s not a horrible game; more of a FPS on a spaceship I guess.
From the first time I played through the opening scene, I’ve had a nagging problem with Deadspace, and I just realized what it is: this game totally rips on Bioshock. There too many similarities between the two games to be coincidence.
The openings to both games are similar: in Deadspace, you’re on a rescue ship that crashes into the big mining vessel, there are flames everywhere and you flee into an entrance where there is a grand ‘Welcome to our Ship’ kind of entrance, and you take an elevator down into the ship and the game begins. Very similar to Bioshock? You bet.
Bioshock had vending machines strewn about that you used to buy upgrades, ammo, health, etc…Deadspace has kiosks called Stores strewn about that you use, but wait! If you’ve played Deadspace, you’ve seen the things everywhere that look like a total rip on the vending machines in Bioshock! You don’t use them in Deadspace, but I was so used to Bioshock I walked right up to the first one I saw and tried to buy something. Hmmmm…
In Bioshock, you use ‘plasmids’ to gain new special abilities. So far in Deadspace I have the abilities of Telekinesis (push/pull objects) and the ability to slow time. While you don’t stick a needle in your arm as in Bioshock, using the abilities feels somewhat similar.
And the story? Guess how you learn about the story in Deadspace? By finding audio recordings strewn about the ship that you can pick up and listen to. What? Like that isn’t EXACTLY like Bioshock! And you are told what to do by someone via radio com, and you’re not sure who to trust…geez, I can’t believe how much they ripped on Bioshock! I’m hoping at least the ending of Deadspace is different than Bioshock…
About the game itself…If you buy if for the PC, the controls are kind of bad. First, you CANNOT remap any of the controls. I’m hoping they address this in a patch soon! If you have an xbox360 controller (I do) it works with Deadspace, but you can’t remap any of its button layout, either. It’s also VERY hard to use any controls unless you disable the v-sync in the video options (had to look on their forums to find that fix!) With V-sync enabled, your mouse jumps around erratically and it’s pretty much unplayable; with v-sync disabled, it’s much more playable.
The game is pretty, the sound effects and music are ok, and it runs smooth as butter on my PC.
