Dead Space 3

Dead Space 3's co-op mode ends up mirroring the single-player experience: slick, entertaining, with the occasional moment of brilliance, marred by a lack of tension, pacing and pant-filling scares.

With the third entry of the Dead Space series, Visceral Games goes in another direction than before. Horror elements makes space for pure action with the introduction of co-op, open landscapes and cover based shooting. As an action game it's pretty good but it's still the worst game in the trilogy.

Scored as a trilogy and compared to the first two titles, the game scores lower than the previous two. But this isn’t the same style of gameplay and we weren’t lied to about it being changed. It’s a different type of game and should be played like one.

A combination of an average shooter (that won’t appeal to shooter fans) and a (tension and atmosphere barren) survival horror game.

Diehard fans of the previous two games will have just as much fun this time around, assuming they aren’t expecting broad innovations. Everything is polished and this is clearly a title with a lot of funding behind it, but all the money in the world can’t buy innovation. By no means a bad sequel, it doesn’t quite offer a way for Dead Space to evolve as a series beyond its past two instalments, even if the formula here is still potent.

If you’ve played the previous games you’ll be able to spot the scares a mile away... and you’ll likely pine for the panic and purity of the original in the face of so many changes. But taken in isolation, Dead Space 3 is still an enjoyable and worthwhile experience: well-produced, polished and with enough narrative ups and downs (emphasis is very much on the downs) and set-pieces to sustain its ten-hour duration.

Dead Space 3 has moments in which it is just as exciting and tense as its predecessor and new additions, such as crafting your own weapons, are great. However, the boring human enemies, repetitive encounters with the necromorph, a weak story and the feeling that the game has been stretched, make sure that this trilogy ending doesn’t stack up to the first and second Dead Space.

Dead Space 3 is overlong – even bloated – larded with repetitive quests to fetch keys and alien artifacts, open doors and backtrack over the same terrain, on and on. Much of its 15-hour-or-so single-player campaign feels like a chore.

Near the end of the game, Isaac Clarke tells John Carver, “Good men mean well. We just don’t always end up doing well.” Ironically, the statement is exactly how I feel about Visceral Games’ work on Dead Space 3. The elements they chose to add were in hopes to attract a larger audience yet in a questionable direction. What’s left is a game that is mildly fun, but filled with flaws.

Misfires and all, it’s at least commendable that Dead Space 3 makes an effort to exhibit some fresh experimentation into what has become a truly bloated media franchise; plus the combat still shines for the most part. Sadly though, better elements like the crafting system are lamentably set against a mundane and lifeless backdrop that rarely excites, let alone spooks, on the grand level of previous games in the series.

Sacrifices have been made that really don’t give Dead Space 3 much to show for. Previous installments knew how to grasp onto players with the harrowing but tight gameplay, but in Dead Space 3 only the latter of these aspects remain standing. Along with the coöp those elements barely save the game, because other than that it feels like an illogical, bland and weak experience. Dead Space 3 is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be and the player suffers for it.

I'm still glad I saw the Dead Space trilogy through to the end--and if you're invested in the series it's absolutely worth playing--but it's too bad this respectable series, which felt so exciting and fresh when it debuted just a few years ago, had to go out on a middling note.

Taken as a whole, Dead Space 3 is far more infuriating than it is bad.