Reviews: Doom, Boring Boring Doom

So, I finished another National Novel Writing Month this week. I can't say it was my best work. On the plus side, I think I know the problem. I need a better voice for the story itself, for one thing. But I can get into this more next week. For now, I'm going over another video game review. The last game I played to completion was Dead Space.

Dead Space is a survival horror game, and like other games of this genre, it is intended to work both to excite the players through normal game play and to invoke fear as any scary fiction is. Obviously the former affects the latter, but I my response to each element is so different that I will treat them separately.

The game takes place in the far future on a space station on the outskirts of human civilization, in the fine tradition of movies from Alien to Event Horizon. You play Isaac Clark, an engineer and part of a team sent to investigate and repair the station, only to learn that by the time they got there, the place is overrun with monsters and most of the crew is dead.

In terms of game play, it's a pretty decent game. You play the game from behind Isaac's back in a situation nearly identical to Resident Evil 4. You can directly aim at targets to hit specific body parts, and the game uses this cleverly by giving enemies weak points on not just their head, but also their limbs. You can blow off one or more arms and legs, and enemies will react appropriately by crawling at you should their legs be gone or even stagger around blindly without a head! There are the usual advancement and customization options, including multiple selectable weapons, upgrades to your weapons and armor, and money to collect and use for new weapons, armor, and supplies.

Nothing here is original, though the setting is very notable. The space setting includes many areas that are now in a vacuum, giving a limited time that to do your job and escape and altering your sound and game play, while other areas (often the same ones) are in zero gravity and let you leap to nearby walls or ceilings. The end result is a very enjoyable game, one I defeated twice in a row in rapid succession, with only two issues that tend to bother me. The first is yet another game that emphasizes enemy grapple attacks, which require wild button flailing to escape each time and occur far to often. The other is a bad habit of enemies popping out of literally nowhere behind you. I understand this is a clever monster tactic, and it makes sense in a game that already warned you about popping out of ventilation ducts and such, but I never thought the game didn't give you enough visual or sound warning that these things attack you.

But nobody plays survival horrors for the action alone. They have to at least try to scare you, and the game does that. That is where things get tricky, though. I know part of that is a personal issue. As I think I said before, monsters make me giggle. I treat the arrival of Pyramid Head like they greeted Norm on Cheers, and horrible abominations just make me want to make my own designs worse. But there are other kinds of fear in games. There is the classic "startle" fear, where something comes out of nowhere, even if the thing is technically not a threat. And there is simple environmental fears, where an oppressive and hostile location is enough to inspire, if not outright panic, at least a continual dread. This game is good at this element, with everything from ominous chanting and songs over the station intercom and the corpses of dead cultists to entire rooms coated with dripping organic material and the still-living victims trapped in nightmarish forms.

And it's here that I had some complaints. Throughout the game, your run into the rare survivors on the space station, though I use the word "survivor" is very loosely. Most of the survivors are either dying from wounds, driven mad to the point of suicide, or both. After a while, the inevitability of these events ruing any shock value. Oh wow, another crazy person shot herself in the head? Shock. It's not like you can do anything about it. You can't give medical attention, intervene before the crazies kill others or themselves, or even kill them yourself to shorten their suffering. There is even one woman who doesn't do anything or suffer any wound; she just stands somewhere, giggling. And you can't do squat! No dragging her to safety, no helping her recover, you can't even say sorry. Two minutes later all the air is dumped from the area and she's dead anyway.

So why should I care? I can understand that your main character is voiceless and his only back story or personality is tied to a girlfriend who worked on the station and may be in danger throughout the game. But it disaffects you after a while. That's why the similarly-named Dead Rising was much more terrifying to me, despite being the wacky, lighter zombie apocalypse. There were tons of obviously doomed survivors, but there were almost fifty people you could also rescue, but most were not obligatory. You could fail to find them in time or lead them to your doom, and if they die horrible deaths, it's because you failed. After all the years of games, screaming walls of flesh or half-human monsters with spike tentacles growing out of the backs don't scare me. The clock does.

Save for Dead Rising, this was probably my favorite of my recently rated games. It was frustrating at times, but also fun, with an atmosphere that doesn't near that of Silent Hill but at least is a good imitation. But as a scary game, it could have been much more effective just by combining the fear with the game play better and by investing me a bit. What's so scary about dead space without live space, after all?