Things haven’t gotten any better for engineer Isaac Clarke since his narrow escape in the first “Dead Space.” In that game he battled hundreds of disgusting space zombies called Necromorphs on the planet-cracker ship Ishimura and managed to destroy the relic that was responsible for them, but the girlfriend he went there to save was dead before he ever arrived on the ship.Now, Isaac’s slowly going fatally insane, thanks to the effects of the relic, and has been drugged into a coma and experimented on for three years in a secretive area of a massive space station.
As “Dead Space 2” begins, Isaac is unarmed and in a straitjacket, the man who freed him from his cell is almost immediately killed by a Necromorph, and the situation seems worse than ever. Isaac soon finds out he’s on the Sprawl, a huge space station built into a piece of Saturn’s moon Titan, and that the station has been overrun by Necromorphs despite his efforts to wipe them out in the original game.
Isaac manages to arm himself and find a new armored suit, as well as regain his trusty kinesis module for telekinetically moving objects, and his stasis module for slowing down enemies and objects in time.
The game plays a lot like the original, with periods of nervous exploration punctuated by creepy sounds and frequent struggles with indescribable horrors in dark, blood-soaked hallways and chambers. The Necromorphs can be killed only by severing their limbs from their bodies, and Isaac’s weapons take advantage of this weakness, often making horizontal or vertical cuts.
The game features a new eight-player mode in which a team of humans tries to fulfill objectives while a team of Necromorphs tries to stop them.
Players wishing to see the beginnings of the Necromorph outbreak on the Sprawl can check out “Dead Space: Ignition,” a prequel of sorts that tells its story through comic book-style scenes with some rudimentary animation. The game play, art and animation aren’t great, but “Dead Space: Ignition” offers some background on Franco Delille, who appears briefly in “Dead Space 2,” and provides some bonus items for Isaac to collect on his mission.
There isn’t any lopping off of limbs for Franco. Instead, he steps in whenever some electronics need fixing or hacking for one of three mini-games.
One game is a race through firewalls and blocks of data in an attempt to beat program defenses to the system’s core. The second challenge is a tower defense-style game, only the player is the one sending swarms of viruses against prepared defenses.
Finally, the most interesting game has players trying to direct colored lasers into the correct receivers using reflective nodes.