You know, for what Vandal did in the previous chapter, I feel like Tiedemann's reaction is pretty subdued. Maybe it's just a form of management that when you want the one person who can fix a situation to be the same person who caused the situation to be exponentially worse, you shouldn't verbally destroy them.
I feel like IronMonkey including a section where Vandal was walking in space (on the outside of the station) existed for two reasons, and none of them I think are particularly great reasons. The first being that Issac did it in Dead Space so they included it here. Secondly, because RIGs have an oxygen meter, you should have a sequence where you actually need to be aware of your oxygen levels. The problem with this is that you then cannot create an area for Vandal to pass through that requires more than 60 seconds of oxygen if the player never upgraded their oxygen levels with Power Nodes because then you create a softlock. The solution to this is to have oxygen refill stations, at least one so Vandal can refill at a point where they can still make it through the area without dying. And then when you throw enemies into the mix (on the return trip), there is not a lot of tension about running out of oxygen because you can just have Vandal fox guarding the oxygen refill station while killing the set number of enemies the game throws at you. The solution to this would be to have enemies infinitely spawn and you just need to avoid them or kill them between the refill station and the exit.
And then there are two hallucinations which have been lacking the last couple of chapters, the first with the Brute jumpscare in the storage room, and the second with Vandal passing through a door into a desert where there's a Marker and then a smash cut to Vandal back on The Sprawl. I also love the tone of Vandal's voice, like they are exhausted and are on the verge of giving up and into the reality of the hallucinations. It might seem rough, to have zero transition between the desert and being back on the station, but I love that IronMonkey had the guts to try something so potentially jarring and not have any kind of polish to it. I only wish that I had turned around before continuing to see if the door back to The Sprawl was still there or if it disappeared when you passed through.
Then we get an anomaly for the game, a Bench, and a Store halfway through the chapter. As far as game mechanics go, this is as good of an indication that there is about to be a battle that you should bulk up for. Buy that Level 4 RIG if you haven't already, spend all your Power Nodes, and buy more ammo with any leftover credits.
Before we get to the Brute battle, let's briefly talk about the corruption that's spreading around The Sprawl. In Dead Space and Dead Space 2, whenever Issac walked on/through this stuff, his feet would stick and his speed would slow, forcing you to walk. Most of the time, the corruption was used as a form of environmental atmosphere but would occasionally be placed in areas where you would encounter Necromorphs as a way of adding a hazard to combat. In Dead Space (Mobile), while the corruption is physically scattered throughout the station, there is no effect, either audible or physical. I could not find anything from IronMonkey about it being an oversight or omitted due to technical limitations, and from what I could tell, this room where you fight the Brute was the only significant instance of corruption being heavily used in a combat area. Now, I am eternally thankful that the corruption does not actually do anything apart from looking a bit icky.
And then comes the doozy of sanity effects, that while fairly well implemented, is now a little outdated. The moment two more Brutes burst into the room after clearing it of additional Necromorphs, there is a red low battery flashing in the upper left corner of the screen. Your screen then goes black, presumably giving the impression that you will either be killed by the Brutes or that the game would not have saved your progress and you will have to start the chapter over from the beginning. But then you briefly see the start/load screen from Dead Space. Then there is the pop-up text of "Confront your fears," which I don't know if it's purposefully misleading or what it meant to have the computer terminal located behind the door? I also recognize that I probably should not have wasted all of that ammo shooting at the Marker and the door. It had been seven years since I last played and I couldn't specifically remember what you needed to do.
Then, once you do use the two terminals, you have the hallway to run down where nothing specific happens other than the station completely disappearing and there being a hallway filled with hanging corpses and red fog. Only for you to end up back where you presumably started, back at the terminal in front of the Marker in the desert. In this instance when you see an image of Vandal running towards you, this time I decided to shoot the duplicate since all of the previous times it had turned into a Necromorph so I am willing to bet that something similar would have happened, and then still taking you back to the room where you fought the Brute.
Finally, there is the last zero oxygen sequence with the aforementioned spawning Necromorphs, which really only became tense when the screen became more and more filled with torn assets and finding that tapping the O2 button to refill the oxygen tank took a couple of attempts. I honestly could have done without this battle sequence but I can understand the need to justify having a zero oxygen battle sequence, again for the reasons I already went into back up at the top.
And then to have the chapter fade out in another one of those endless hallways, I was not happy about. I think I just really like chapters that start/end at trams, but only if you don't have to worry about a tram sequence at the end of the chapter. Or at least at the end of chapters 9 and 10.
CHAPTER 12: YESTERDAY'S PROBLEM
I have mixed feelings about Chapter 12. On one hand, all it is is a Bench and Store stock-up followed up by a needlessly long traverse ending in the final boss fight. I get the long jumping down to the floor of the reactor core as a way to show scale of the reactor core and the extent of the spread of the corruption, but then why include so many places you can jump to that are out of the way and take upwards of 15 seconds? Maybe if the traversal was made a little more interesting with ammo to collect along the way, it might have made those nearly eight minutes a little bit more palatable. And I am not talking about there being combat encounters either to further eat up your ammo before the BBEG, just something to make the downward jump/climb to the bottom of the reactor a little more interesting.
And once you are down there, I think my game had a little bit of a hiccup as it took 11 seconds for Vandal to react to the Necromorph Boss just hanging there. Maybe I just needed to move?
The fight against the Boss (because there is no other name given) is pretty straightforward as far as Dead Space bosses go. You dodge the big thing it swings at you (a proboscis in this case I think), and the slow-moving projectiles, and aim for the bright yellow puss-filled sacs. That being said, I again acknowledge that my aim really sucks. I was thankful though that when I died, that I did not have to start the boss fight over from the beginning and that it was only from the halfway point. I probably also should have died on that second attempt with all the times the RIG announced that my health was critical, so I'll just chalk it up to dumb luck that I was able to regenerate just enough health to sustain another hit. Ultimately, I like that IronMonkey did not try to do too much with the actual mechanics of the battle, in that had this been on a console or PC, I could have seen the decision to require Vandal to use kinesis on the drill thing that pummels the boss at the end for the killing blow. Or even needing to move around the stage more, maybe using the zero-g jumping mechanic.
I am also thankful that there wasn't as much screen and asset tearing going on from when I first played the game because back then, I couldn't see almost half of the screen.
And that brings Dead Space (Mobile) to a close. Chapter 11 was a great mix of concise combat and a mix of sanity effects, some of which I would classify as the highlight of the game, with Chapter 2 being a very close second. Chapter 12 being essentially just a boss fight with an overly long opening sequence could have been trimmed, but I have already talked about that just a hundred words earlier.
As for the entire game, I don't think I realized how much of the middle-late chapters came across as filler and how much I really disliked the tram stages in Chapters 9 and 10. I know that part of my problems throughout the game had to do with the screen recording widget and the two previous times I had played, I played through on Easy difficulty with this being the first time playing through on Normal; although I think that really only colored my perception of the tram in Chapters 9 and 10.
I would love if this game was somehow resurrected by EA Games, assuming that they hold all rights to the entire Dead Space franchise, and maybe with the success of the Dead Space reboot Dead Space 2 will be remade along with Dead Space Extraction and Dead Space (Mobile). I'm not holding my breath though because of how much of a departure IronMonkey took with its approach to sanity effects compared to how Issac Clarke experienced his (poorly named) dementia. The transition to console would take a bit of work, but I still think it would be possible as the game still very much holds up 12 years after its initial release.
So if you are wondering, yes, I still love Dead Space (Mobile), and is likely my second favorite game in the entire original franchise just behind the first Dead Space. It is not without its flaws, but there are very few games I have played that I would categorize as flawless and I would highly recommend anyone with an Android phone capable of playing this game to do so because it is still that good of a survival horror game.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment