If you listen to the podcast you have heard me say that I played the Dead Space 3 demo this past week and that instead of telling you about it, I wanted you to just go out and play it. Hopefully by now you’ve had some time to either play it or at the very least download it to your console, so now I’m going to tell you about it.
To start things off you find out that Isaac’s ship has crashed on Tau Volantis upon re-entry and that the crew is missing. At this point already I’m just feeling very sorry for Isaac. I mean this guy has had the world on his shoulders, the love of his life is dead and has been used to manipulate him in the sickest ways, and just when he thinks he’s safe on his ship it crashes. Oh, and he wakes up looking like this:
His suit is all beat up, he’s bleeding, and it looks like he’s turned into a popsicle. Isaac has had it rough and they are definitely laying that on thick right off the bat. As the demo progressed my heart just ached for him as he limped through the treacherous terrain of Tau Volantis. And speaking of Tau Volantis’ terrain, it seems to be pretty harsh and from the short portion of the demo where Isaac is fighting against the elements it looks like the developers are going to use this to their advantage when trying to scare you. At one point I was walking up a path that seemed to be clear and then the cold winds blew the snow around so I could no longer see what laid ahead of me; and of course a necromorph jumped out at me as I advanced through the blizzard like conditions. To me, this screams typical Dead Space scare; they build the tension up to a point where you know something is going to get you and even though you’re expecting it (I mean come on, a blizzard comes in out of no where and I didn’t expect to be jumped?), it still scares the crap out of you. Or at least it always gets me. We’ve recently been discussing at length how good The Walking Dead by Telltale Games is at playing your heartstrings through the interactive story telling, and I think the Dead Space series does a good job of using that same interactive element to lure you into their traps, scares, and sometimes cheap thrills to create this haunting environment.
The demo also allows you to play around with the new weapon bench which has a feature that allows you to not only build your own weapon from items you scavenge, but you can manipulate the weapons you’ve already been given. Playing around with the bench was interesting, I definitely enjoyed making my own weapon complete with a rifle and pulse-like shotgun attachment but the demo made this element feel limited in a way that I hope doesn’t continue outside of the demo. The idea behind it is that you can make your own “perfect weapon” but unless they give me an unlimited number of gun options to build in the full version, I’m not very impressed.
I also ran into some new(ish) enemies/mutations at a critical point of the demo when I am basically being attacked by a mining drill the size of a house, and since I was preoccupied by trying not to be pureed by the drill I didn’t have much time to see what this necromorph will be like. It looks much more human than most of the other necromorphs because it doesn’t seem to continue to mutate as you shoot at it, but in all the pictures I can find of it it looks likes it’s just a taller version of the child-like Pack enemy. It goes down with one shot though so I don’t really care much what it is. Another new enemy is the Unitologists. While technically speaking you’ve been “fighting” them in previous versions, this time you are actually shooting at them as they shoot at you. It adds a very different element to the game as they are also being constantly ambushed by necromorphs and then of course turning into necromorphs themselves.
You have little interaction in the demo with the newly playable character in the drop-in/out co-op campaign mode, EarthGov Sergeant John Carver, but I imagine we’ll see much more of him in the full version. Your biggest interaction with his character comes right at the end of the demo as the “Snowbeast” attacks. Not only is this boss enemy huge, but the demo ends with Isaac facing his giant, ugly mouth which you can see in this concept art:
Overall, this demo has me very excited. Not only is this game coming out very soon, February 5th, but it has everything in it that I continue to love about Dead Space and Visceral Games’ brand of “survival horror.” Download the demo, try it out, and let me know what you though of it!
