Dead Space

When I first saw the box art for Dead Space I couldn't for the life of me see the image. It was like a magic eye or one of those optical illusions that trick your eyes into focusing on the wrong thing then make you feel stupid for not seeing the other half all along.

"A severed hand? Really?" Was the reaction that I had in my head. Not that after playing through the game almost three times makes that severed hand spontaneously gather some meaning. Despite my unnecessary confusion with said box art, I've enjoyed the game immensely.

While not a long game, this game has what seems to have been missing from the latest games I've played through: polish. Aside from tables sometimes adhere themselves to your torso like skirts, the game looks, feels, sounds, and controls almost perfectly. There's no enemy AI so everything is pretty much scripted; I.E. monster X drops down from the ceiling when you hit a certain trigger, every time, without fail. From that point they just rush and you swinging their blades for hands like there is no tomorrow. I've now played it 2 times back to back, albeit to mostly get the final achievements for another 'hundie' as its referred to in this household.

"Non-hundies are not the kind of hundies we need!"

The trickiest of the achievements are probably the gratuitous play this game through on the hardest setting:

Epic Tier 3 Engineer 150
Complete the game on the hardest difficulty setting

This isn't proving to be as difficult has I had anticipated. The joker on xbox360achievements.org acted like this was some sort of ridiculously hard mode. The truth is if you use your stasis and don't buy the guns that suck, I only bought and use the plasma cutter, pulse rifle and force gun, the only difference in the play through is that enemies take around one more round to kill and they take off WAY more health when they hit you. However, if you use your stasis generously getting his shouldn't be a problem.

The other hard achievement in the game is:

Don't get cocky, kid 10

Survive the ADS Cannon with over 50% shield strength remaining

This one is particularly hard because you start at 85% shields and there are so many asteroids flying at you that you can't see some of them at times because they're out of your field of view. This took me around 20 or so tries to finally do it. There are definitely some more forgiving scripts for this one and I think I finished it on one of the easier ones. My only tip is to only fire one of the cannons so you don't overheat that quickly and catch them asteroids early.

The story in this game is actually pretty good. I'm not one for space station shooter/horror type games but this is a shining example of a game that's done right.