Dead Space 3: Better Than You Remember

First things first. If I know you, Reader, you're probably wondering, "Wait a minute--was that Phil Collins?"

Yes and no. It's a cover of his 1979 megahit "In the Air Tonight". And if you're anything like me, hearing that song in an official trailer made you think, "Ugh, that isn't a good sign."

But Dead Space 3 is actually really good, certainly better than the 77 it's racked up on Metacritic. It strikes a different tone than the previous games in the series, and the ending is kind of weak, but I view the fact that there are professional game reviewers giving it a 6 out of 10 as a sign of a certain amount of entitlement that's settling into gamer culture (for further examples, see: Half Life 3-Gate and Mass Effect 3-Gate).

Anyway, the game opens on the Moon, with our increasingly haggard hero, Isaac Clarke, being pressed into service by two meatheads named Norton and Carver. Isaac’s fellow survivor of Dead Space 2 and more recently former flame, Ellie Langford, has gone missing on some planet nobody’s ever heard of called Tau Volantis. Before she hyper-drived there or whatever, Ellie told them, “When I disappear, go find Isaac, so he and I can have, like, kind of a romantic reconciliation arc over the course of the game.” (I'm being glib, but less than you might think.)

Isaac and the science bros have to fight their way off of the Moon, because the Earth’s government has become so ineffectual that the Unitologists are running rampant. Unitologists are, as far as I’ve deduced, the Dead Space series’ answer to the question, “What if Scientology’s whole ancient, intergalactic empire schtick was true, except L. Ron Hubbard was secretly in the tank for the evil, alien warlord, Xenu, who was himself actually a thinly-veiled analogue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu?” (Not a very succinct question, I admit.)

Whatever their motivation, there are these alien markers driving living people crazy and turning corpses into rotting, fleshy tentacle-monsters, and the Unitologists see this and conclude, as might any of us, “Six corpses clumped together into a squid is the next stage in human evolution!” Excluding the corpse-monsters—which the game calls “necromorphs”—the Unitologists are the primary antagonists, and, true to that fact, this is the first game in the series where you actually engage in gun battles with other humans.

Eventually, Isaac makes his way to Norton and Carver’s ship, where he manages to saunter all the way from the airlock to the bridge before a space-mine takes out the windshield and what was supposed to be a simple mission… gets complicated . This is when the gameplay gets a lot more interesting. Hanging above this planet no one knew existed is a derelict fleet of two-hundred-year-old Earth ships. As Isaac, you have to jaunt around between dead ships, sometimes by launching yourself into a vacuum, scavenging parts and figuring out what happened to the people who came before. Then you crash a shuttle on Tau Volantis, trudge across an icy hellscape, climb a mountain, activate an ancient, alien machine the size of a city, and thereby save the universe.

I can understand why some people have been down on this installment. Between the more familiar setting, the child/baby monsters, and the creepy visits from Isaac’s dead fiancé, Dead Space 2 is a much scarier game (scarier than the original, as well). Horror, as a genre, usually washes over me like a light summer rain, and I couldn't play Dead Space 2 too late into the evening for fear of dreams fraught with severed limbs and shark-mouthed infants. Could they have jacked that level of intensity up a few notches, as is standard operating procedure when creating a sequel? Past screeching undead schoolchildren and exploding babies that crawl on the ceiling? I don’t know, probably? But there has to be a point past which they’d experience diminishing returns as far as attracting players, and personally, I think they were getting pretty close. Really, though, it's not that I wouldn't have enjoyed another horror-themed Dead Space (I probably would have), or that I prefer action (I don't), but I think they made a rip-roaring, big budget science fiction game. And we don’t get a lot of those, either.

Dead Space 3’s shooting is fine, and the crafting system is interesting, but by the time I was a few chapters in, I’d put together a shotgun/rocket launcher combo that I stuck with all the way to the end (so I wouldn't have to go to the trouble of aiming too much—like I said, action games aren't my strong suit). Most of the game’s allure is in the grimy, intricate detail of its dystopian future—a human civilization that’s all used up and slowly deteriorating—and the most thrilling moments come when Isaac’s facing off against the environment: jetting around a vacuum in a field of debris above Tau Volantis, his oxygen slowly depleting; or staggering through a blizzard after a trail of flares, huddling by the scattered flaming wreckage of his crashed ship for warmth. The amount of care that’s been put into crafting the environments, especially the outdoor environments, and this Earth’s history is truly impressive, and those are the areas where Dead Space 3 really shines.

The ending is kind of weak, just in terms of providing a satisfying finish to the story, and although I walked a lonely road and therefore cannot comment on the co-op, there are a few points in the game where I felt like Isaac and Carver—the aforementioned soldier and potential co-op partner—were supposed to have gone through more of an ordeal together than I got to experience.

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Near the beginning, Isaac says something like, “Hey, Carver—sorry I stepped on your foot back there. Things were pretty hectic, what with the explosive decompression and corpse monsters and etc.”

And Carver’s like, “You think you know me? You think you know what I’ve been through? Die in a fire, nerd.”

But right before the end, they share a bromantic moment, where Carver admits that he has feelings, too, and Isaac tells him he’s an okay guy, and I’m thinking, “You guys have known each other for, like, twenty-four hours and you’ve barely spoken.”

If I had to guess, I'd say that at some point in one of the co-op sections, Isaac saves Carver's life, and Carver's like, "Sometimes I worry that I'm not smart enough."

And Isaac, touched by his honesty, responds, "Sometimes I wish my biceps had that big vein. You know the one I'm talking about."

And a corpse monster with seven arms and eleven mouths slides out of a ceiling vent and says, "Sometimes I wish I was prettier!"

And then they hug it out.

"I just... want... to hold you!"

If they ever make Dead Space 4, it's probably going to open with Isaac and Carver sharing an apartment and arguing over whose turn it is to take out the space garbage. And I’m fine with that. Carver’s a stereotypical action guy, as far as I can tell, but the voice actor does a good job and I appreciate the occasional break in Isaac’s enforced solitude.

Mostly well-written and well-acted, gorgeous, in a scruffy, purposely dingy sort of way, with gameplay that ranges from good to occasionally great—yeah, I like Dead Space 3 a lot, and if you’re boycotting it because they added co-op, you’re not really hurting anyone but yourself. If you’re boycotting it because of EA’s gross, obvious, money-grubby system of in-game purchases and first-day DLC… well, yeah, I can’t blame you for feeling that way. But I can tell you that you can get through the entire game, and easily, like, you’ll actually still have too much stuff, without spending an extra penny.