Play Diary: Dead Space

Started playing on Sunday 24th August.

Initial problems: huge mouse lag in menus and game. Searching the internet suggested that turning off vertical sync would fix this. This is a serious usability problem. After fixing that I had to increase the mouse sensitivity to its maximum in order to get the kind of performance I'm used to (I enjoy FPS games like TF2 and L4D.) Maybe this is due to the game leading on 360 and only being ported the PC. As such they may have balanced the enemies with the assumption that the player couldn't react very quickly as they had to control the avatar using a control pad.

Second problem was the perspective. Why does it use a 3rd person view? Enclosed interior environments are better suited to 1st person. Currently the character takes up a considerable amount of the limited view with no real benefit that I can think of. This not only causes problems for the player but also for the machine (extra texture & vertex processing.) My early impression is that this is an FPS, and my feeling is that a first person view would improve the experience. I believe the 3rd person view is more popular with Asian markets, but the realistic visual style and uninspiring grey/brown colour palette doesn't strike me as being very appealing in the East.

There are more control issues though. For example why am I obliged to continually manually press "B" in order to bring up a HUD showing me where my next objective is? It's pretty tedious. I feel like I'm being punished. In free roaming, open areas it wouldn't be so bad as you could see a long way into the distance, so wouldn't need to press it so often. But in small, enclosed interior environments it seems silly as there are such short distances between doors / bends in corridors, etc that the indicator is only useful for extremely short navigation, and hence has to be frequently repeated.

So far the narrative has been pretty predictable too.

I was a bit annoyed with the "Press E to get rid of the monster" QTE. I pressed E but nothing happened and I died. Turns out you have to *mash* E. Why?

Overall I'd say it is worth the £5 I paid for it, but that's all.

Yahtzee's thoughts.