tassletine said:
I don't understand the love for this game. It's well programmed and playable but I can't work out why something like this gets 9's whereas Madworld was stuck with 5-6's when Madworld is based around a similar mechanic.
Er wat? Madworld is a never-ending enemy bashing without the feel of danger lurking in every corner and moreover, it lacks sympathetic character and interesting and cohesive background storyline. Dead Space is a universe on its own, filled with multitude of characters who have either died or still surviving. This causes most players to form an attachment to the surviving characters, especially Isaac.
1) The story. Or lack of it. If I hadn't played the first game I don't think I would have understood what was going on. Having the protagonist's dead wife hassle him throughout the game is extremely weak as a plot point as she is never really introduced to us during the adventure and you can't really hear what she says clearly anyway.
It's not his wife. It's his GF. If you haven't dealt with the loss of someone you love (whether through break up or death), then obviously you can't understand his pain. But most adults have been through the same thing Isaac went through, except without the psychosis and the crazy delusions from the marker. And fuck that, having to get over someone that you love is not easy. It really haunts you for a while and the game presents a rather realistic consequences from the loss of a person.
It's funny that you complain about the story though considering that Madworld barely has any story in comparison to Dead Space 2.
Ditto all the other characters. People appearing on screens does nothing to engage me in what's going on. Watching a guy slitting his own throat has far more impact than watching one character you've never met struggle with another you've never met.
Great that you've saved the girl, how cathartic, except you never actually spent enough time with her in the first place to care.
It's not that what happens is bad, just that so much weight is placed on moments that have no dramatic impact.
You're saying that seeing a human slitting his own throat has no dramatic impact? Well, for you maybe but I'm not cold stone person who can't feel pain on behalf of someone that I don't know well. A death is a death whether it's someone you know or not.
2) The gameplay is very samey. Clear the area, walk forward. Upgrade. This would be fine if there was some variety in the gameplay or some sort of score based system but there isn't. Also, seeing as you're pretty much moving in a straight line it was surprising how many times I got lost.
You must not like many games then because most games has that kind of format. All platformers has jumping around blocks of stuff, all adventures has some enemies to clear and areas to explore/puzzle to solve, and open world games well, pretty much just fucking around in an open world. It'd be like saying Mario games has nothing else to do but jumping around blocks and turtle's shell.
I genuinely preferred extraction. It does exactly the same thing but the characters are more clearly defined and you don't have to push forward on the stick to walk -- I'm serious about this as there's almost nothing in Dead Space 2 that requires you to do anything else apart from push forward to get to a new area. No exploration and hardly any real puzzle solving. It's all about the shooting - so given that I just wish it WAS all about the shooting.
Extraction was a weak game. I don't want to be directed as to where I supposed to go within an already confined amount of space. So what if the amount of space I have is limited? I still want to explore every nook and cranny and gets surprised/shocked when an enemy drops in or I find a goody. If all you want is a railshooter, there are some railshooter games you can play. But don't ask Dead Space main series to become one.
A game like Resident Evil 4 knew how to ramp up the scares and build to something. DS2 reminded me of Doom 3 more than anything. The programming team are doing everything right but they don't seem to know what makes a game like this work as a whole.
Bleh. I HATE Resident Evil 4. Lame main character, lame pathetic villain, lack of genuine tension or scare. The most over-rated game from last generation and the reason why RE series is now in decline.
