After toughly scrubbing my trousers from the original Dead Space I was highly looking forward to Dead Space 2, I had high expectations for DS2 as the original stands as one of my favourite games of the past decade. Set 3 years after the original Dead Space, Isaac Clarke awakes in a cell in a space station known only as the sprawl on one of Saturn's moons, Now I stand by my statement that Dead Space is one of my favourite games of the decade but as soon as I pressed start game I was blown away. You begin talking to a shrink about the events on the USG Ishimura and about your dead girlfriend Nicole. You then awake in a small cell being "rescued" by Franco from DS: Ignition when a necro comes down kills Franco, attacks you (with no weapon at this point) and falls over, you are told how to run and that is it, 5 small corridors later and I have 50 necro bastards behind me, 1 pip of the health bar and a QTE to get through a closing door with a re-animator holding onto my ankles. As you can tell the pace is up from the start but, however it quickly does down as you have no means of defending yourself until the beginning of chapter 2.
The sprawl makes as a much better location for DS as small corridors are replaced by large open plazas where it can make for the perfect ambush point, it also means as it is a city there are a lot more people and a lot more places to go making the game almost double the length of the originals (near enough 12 hours in total) this means, more suits, more guns and of course more enemy types varying in size, look and abilities, my favourite of all the new enemies is the Pack singularly the pack poses no threat but in numbers they are a very deadly foe.
The game hasn’t changed much in the looks department, the slight character touch up and more varied colours are about it but the movement is a lot smoother and enemies have better reactions and damage physics than before.
I suppose as a whole Dead Space 2 is more of an extremely long Add-on to the original with a few touch ups here and there, but this may just be the best game released this year so far, with its shocks still as prominent as they were in the first, great strategic survival horror gameplay and characters you will become to love Dead Space 2 is a must have to anyone’s gaming collection.
Dead Space 2 – 8/10
+Brilliant Sequel
-Too Short
