EA Games @ NYC '08: Dead Space (Hands-On)

FOREWORD: You may have noticed that we didn't cover any EA game during this past E3. That was all with good reason. You see, EA invited us to their New York City showcase at the W Hotel, and so we chose to save the best for last. At EA's "Holidays in July" event, we were able to go hands-on with all of the games present at E3, in addition to two that weren't.

Electronic Art's upcoming library of games is chock full of all sorts of genres. Survival horror is one of those genres, as Dead Space is EA's sci-fi shooter that is one of the few shooters in development that isn't using the Unreal Engine as its basis. But unlike other horror titles, Dead Space boasts a number of unique qualities that ensure you won't be confusing it for anything else.

Our first impression of the game is how amazing the audio is. The game was running through a 5.1 setup, and it demonstrated superb use of each and every channel in corners of the room. This audio setup was done intentionally, as Dead Space (along with RockBand 2) was the only game to have an entire room dedicated solely to it. Dead Space's audio is truly great, and not playing it on a surround setup would be doing the game a disservice.

Visually, the game exhibited a clean and polished picture with little to no aliasing issues, in addition to a steady framerate that didn't budge, no matter how tense the action was. When it came down to the gameplay, the shooting mechanics felt very solid. Your primary weapon in the game is a shooting blade that is meant to cut up the limbs of your enemies. Read up on our earlier preview of the game from a few months ago, detailing the mechanics of the shooting and action.

One of your weapons has a telekinetic ability that allows you to lift and throw objects with it, using them as projectiles. But even though you have a superb arsenal of weapons, you also have some rather aggressive artificial intelligence, so the enemies will put up a fight.

Two of the niftier features we saw was the real-time inventory screen which doesn't require you to pause the game, and it even acts as a light-source. The other feature is being able to enter zero-gravity portions in levels and having the ability to wall on walls.

From what we played, we can say that Dead Space is coming along quite well and should entice sci-fi survival-horror fans when it launches in the Fall.

Related Game(s): Dead Space

7/31/2008 Arnold Katayev

Email this to a friend!
Put this on your webpage or blog: