Video Games Suck - Dead Space 3 (Gayer Version)

It was like watching a loved one get raped. So Suislide already reviewed this game, but I'm bored at work. So why not try my luck at my first review with a little more detail.

So we all remember Dead Space 1 and 2. The first game was very basic, yet eerie enough to give you quality immersion if played with headphones in the dark. Dead Space 2, while staying true to the first game, added a lot of the whole commercial game buck, like better musical score, cinematic cutscenes, a great story and an incredible setting. Who doesn't remember walking by the loud, big, electronic advertisement-jumbotrons and toy-shops? Or the creepy kindergarden shit. All the while your girlfriend mindfucking you with psychotic hallucinations.

Fast forward a year later, to Dead Space 3. I already feared it was going downhill because they were so quick to make a new one, just as with Dragon Age 2, and reaching that cliche shitty-video-game-franchise-yearly-release-cycle.

Graphics
Before the game was released a rumor made the rounds that Dead Space 3 would be playable on hardware from 8 years or so ago. Which sounds like a good thing to those of us who might not have gaming PCs. But what DS3 delivered is just not enough to warrant bragging about performance at this point. Comfirming my fear about the quick release cycle, they simply seem to have used the same engine they did for Dead Space 2. Now back in DS2, that was great. Not because the graphics were too remarkable, but because they looked pretty good nontheless and ran smoothly even on shitty hardware. Visceral Games certainly has some good graphics coders. However in DS3, they should've at least improved upon it. First off, there still is no detailed Graphics settings. You get to choose between the same old low/medium/high/very-high settings, and they all look the same. Some of the textures still look smudgy and apparently anti-aliasing just isn't cool in 2013. This is just not viable anymore. Not with games like Bioshock Infinite waiting on the start line along with you as your competition. Their devs wrote a blog post about all the graphics settings they've put into the next game, including a FOV option, and here you are still dicking us around with 3 or 4 presets. Sadly there is not much more to say about the graphics quality, so just go and read Suislides DS2 review, as it's the same engine.

As for the art style...

It's bullshit. It still looks like Dead Space, but everything is much brighter and there is too much glowing neon shit all around for retarded/console players to know where to go. All ladders glow blue, batteries glow, door handles glow, my dick glows. As for the brightness. I usually always turn down the brightness in games like this. I don't turn it down until I can barely see the image. I turn that fucker down until I feel it looks gritty enough. And even then you hardly ever need to aim your gun/flashlight in order to traverse the levels. The levels simply are not scary anymore. Enemies are the same old enemies, except some of them look a little different. Such as the little tentacle-baby necromorphs, which are now dogs apparently, but you can't even discern any doggish features. They look like mutilated granny vaginas. Enemies no longer have unique features as they did in the previous games. They all seem to flow together and feel generic. And their presentation is non-existent. I'll come to this, and environment design, in the gameplay section.

Sound
I knew that whoever was in charge of picking voice actors for this game was a huge fucking asshole the moment the game booted up. The opening, hence crucial, cutscene has a fucking english cunt speaking, in a monotone, shitty, supposedly-sophisticated accent. Too bad that those of us who don't live on faggot-island, aka Britain, know that accent is pure shit. And the cutscene wasn't even good, like it was in Dead Space 2. They just showed pictures of the previous games! Literally the entire video was screenshots from the previous games with a voice-over by a british cunt. It felt like I was sitting in class again listening to my imbecile classmates give a powerpoint presentation. As a potential schoolshooter this did not help sway my opinion. Are you fucking kidding me? What happened to the awesome start of DS2? Remember that? Isaac sitting there all fucked up, and infront of him was a dark creepy dude, with a dark creepy voice. And then you had silhouettes moving on the Ishimura's walls and finally Isaac's girlfriend came up with her mutilated face and did the weird psycho voice face glow.

"Yeah, fuck that," says the DS3 team. "Let's hire the queen of england to narrate the third game!"

So the horrible video is over, and at this point my penis has gone from stainless steel to stale gummy bears. And where are we? The main menu. The music now, in a desperate attempt to really launch this franchise into orbit, is generic Warner Bros bullshit. It literally is the most boring and generic Warner Bros movie score. I swear I had flashbacks of the first Spiderman movie intro. Might as well have spiderwebs on the screen, you assholes. During the rest of the game, this movie-score shit also remains, and they even tried to incorporate it into the action sequence music. Horrible and cheap in every regard.

Rest of the sounds are the same from the previous games. From item pickups, to doors, to guns, to monsters... everything. Like I said, quick franchise release cycle and same engine. When they taught you the software reuse principles in CS class, this is not what they had in mind you vile sellouts.

Gameplay
Oh yes the gameplay. I don't know how on earth I could possibly keep it short here. It's like trying to fit your diarrhea into a shotglass, while what you really need is a fucking barrel.

Let's start with the level layout/design.
Everything is predictable now! All the vents are so openly and obviously placed that you can always guess what's about to happen. You already know why that's a problem, like the fact that you can always strategize and there is no more danger to your character and so on, so I won't iterate. But here's the biggest problem. With the dark eerie atmosphere completely gone and this game turned into an action shooter, jump-scares were the only thing they had left to make this game scary! It's cheap but it's something! And if we, the players, are always able to know exactly when and where the monsters are going to appear, then there is no more jump scares, you fucking autists! There goes ALL of what Dead Space was. Why not just have the monsters sit on chairs in the middle of the room, legs crossed with a book in their mutant hands, waiting for you? Might as well.

Enemies.
They threw out everything that DS1 and 2 did. Now Necromoprhs are on steroids it seems because they all SPRINT at you. Apparently the Necromoprh outbreak occured on a space colony of Olympic runners, because each time a monster appears he's so quick to sprint up in your face that he'll rubbing his genitals on you before you can even turn around and invesigate what's poking you in the ass. And that's how they tried to make the game difficult. Thought we wouldn't notice? Isaac is a slow fuck, and reloading is slow too. So to make the game hard they just made the monsters so quick that the only problem you'll ever have are the 5 minute gun reloads and clunky controls, while the monsters are basically Nightcrawler from X-Men. And they failed at it too, the game isn't hard, it's very easy yet just frustrating.

Remember how the previous games kept reminding you to blast off the limbs? Well good luck doing that when the enemies are supercharged. And for some reason even when there are slow enemies, half the time it doesn't even work aymore and it just doesn't feel right.

Not that you need to anyway. Lets get to the weapon system.
Crafting basically allows you to make fun weapons, which would be ok except that the weapons just feel silly. In DS1 and 2, Isaac just used whatever he found as a weapon, a plasma cutter and saw etc. But even though they were given the look of trash-gone-gun, they felt like ferocious weaponry. Now that you can actually make weapons from trash you collect, that's exactly how they feel. Like weak piles of trash held together with glue. It's a shitty try at a gimmick which only those diabolic frauds at Capcom managed to ever pull off, and the only reason they did is that people who buy Capcom games are either retarded or 12 and easy to entertain. The only ever useful attachement for your gun in the whole game is a stasis-attachement which thankfully slows the enemies down from warp speed to light speed.

Sometimes though, the enemies will be buggy because I guess someone had the flu and couldn't debug the AI. The enemies will just scream around and be stuck at random locations behind fences or other objects, spazing around, at the other end of the room and unable to reach you until you walk around a little. Immersion factor: 0.

Dead Space 3 also fucked what little realism it had in the ass and never called it the morning after, because now you have universal ammo! Hooray! Gone is the scenario of running out of ammo, and having to strategize how to proceed like in the previous games. Remember what I just said about jump-scares being the only thing this game had left? I lied actually, there is another thing. And that's being vulnerable! Remember how important that is? It's the main thing that made Amnesia such a success as an indie game. Now even on the hardest difficulty you'll be walking around with 500+ bullets for both guns. And that's not a mistake on my behalf there, I did indeed write BOTH guns. You are now, officially, limited to carrying only two guns. Holy shit, did they hire the Duke Nukem assholes for this job?

But really it's fitting to have 500 bullets each time, since that's roughly the number of enemies they tried to fit on each fucking square meter! Instead of having individual creepy monsters for you to gun down in gory glory, you now get a wild crowd of enemies mob up against you so you can mow them down randomly. Did they hire the Serious Sam team for this? I think they'd do a better job though.

Enemy presentation is no longer present. What I mean is that in the previous games each enemy type was introduced seperately, in a fitting location. Remember how they introduced the baby necromorphs by having you walk through a laboratory of broken tubes filled with green liquid and fetuses and x-rays of mutated pregnant women? Or how the puking necromorph was introduced by having some guy get this face melt off at a doorway while he was desperately crawling to save his life? "Yeah shit nigga, fuck setting the scene" says the design team. Because in Dead Space 3 all enemies are randomly introduced into the scene at any time or location! Oh look the exploding-arm necro, oh a baby necro, oh a scorpion necro and regular necro all in the same fucking scene! Necromorphs believe in diversity I guess.

They also tried building in stealth, which sounds like a joke but it's not. At one point the game tells you to throw small objects, as to confuse and distract a pack of little enemies so you can sneak by. Really, Deas Space? Really? I have like 10 medpacks, a shitload of ammo, a grenade launcher and you want me to sneak by a bunch of one-shot enemies? So for this part I was going to make another joke about how you probably hired the Deus Ex guys, but again, they'd do a much better job.

Now there are microtransactions, which is just douchebaggy way of referring to items bought with real life money. You don't even get cool suits by honestly earning them in this game. 40% into the game and you still have only one suit to fucking pick from. But don't fear, the huge DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT button will be glowing right below in case you're a little impotent cheater with no skills but rich parents. People already pay the full price for the game and they should get the full game, but you sellouts still demand a fucking virgin sacrifice even after people pay you.

Story
Utterly boring and ungripping. Even in the previous game there was not a lot in terms of a story line, but what was there was presented in a remarkable way, such as Isaacs constant schizophrenia and struggle to forget his now-creepy-stalker dead girlfriend. In Dead Space 3 however, the story is basically that Isaac is a fucking beat alcoholic impotent loser whose girlfriend left him for another man. Yup.

There is nothing interesting going on, and even the villain is a boring fuck who has no intriguing cause or backstory. He's your average crazy scientologi-- er unitologist cuntbucket. Didn't we already deal with a character like that in Dead Space 1? What is this bullshit. Now you have a squad of the most boring and generic characters you can imagine. They gave Ellie more of a british accent to really make her annoying, and now the story is centered around what a slut she is. There are no interesting cutscenes or story elements that add to the plot. It's always a repetition of you finding somebody, then getting seperated, then having to find a couple of pieces of garbage so you can be united again, and repeat. That's the formula.

"Oh there you are Isaac!"

*some shit happens and Isaac is seperated*

"Fuck, Isaac! Quick find us! Wait.. looks like the ship we need needs fuel. Oh and an engine. Oh and it has no navigation system. Oh and looks like it needs a paintjob too. Oh and don't forget the groceries. Be a dear Isaac and get to work while the rest of our 6 man crew sits here reading 50 shades of grey!"

And then you assemble those fucking pieces and the ship is ready. So now your crew of lazy assholes and yourself are on the ship, with two guys manning the guns and you and Ellie on the steering wheel. So then what happens? You have to do everything! Steer the ship through a fucking minefield (literally) and shoot. When was Isaac promoted to a fucking pilot and gunner? And even if so, why does he have to do both? What are the others doing? I don't mind the action, it's cool, but it doesn't make any fucking sense! It's just action for the sake of action. They have streamlined and fucked this franchise in every regard.

Score
I will not rate this in general terms, because the previous games set the bar too high for the sequel.
So, In comparison to its predecessor it gets a 3/10 tops.
Is it worth buying? No.