Dead Space 3

The Final Chapter

Why hello there.

GREETINGS, HUMAN AUDIENCE.

Hush, you. I haven’t introduced you yet.

*Ahem*

It’s time to review another entry in the critically acclaimed Dead Space series. No spooky whispers from the shadows this time, sadly. Most of the creepy elements have been cut entirely from the game.

THAT IS INCORRECT. YOUR PERSPECTIVE IS JADED AND CYNICAL.

Just be quiet for another twenty seconds, will you?

Anyway, here to assist me to explain what exactly happened with the series and why we got this instead of what we were all hoping for and expecting in a Dead Space game, is Script Generating Robot #17.

Say hello, SGR.

I HAVE ALREADY DONE SO.

Yes...right. Where to begin?

AT THE BEGINNING, OF COURSE.

Of course.

To start things off, Dead Space 3 is pretty much nothing like its predecessors.

YOUR PERCEPTION IS FLAWED. DEAD SPACE 3 IS VERY MUCH SIMILAR TO THE PREVIOUS TITLES IN THE SERIES.

I’m talking right now. You’ll get your chance to argue your case in a minute.

As I was saying, it’s very different from DS and DS2. Both of them are generally more slowly paced survival horror titles. The first one is much slower and creepier than the second, but even by DS2 standards, DS3 is almost in an entirely different genre altogether.

This game is a third person shooter with horror elements and monstrous enemies. It’s much more action oriented than the previous games and in order to really get the full experience, you need to play cooperatively through the campaign with someone else. In fact, there are some really cool moments you’ll completely miss out on unless you are playing as the other main character in the campaign, something which you cannot do while playing alone.

In the first several minutes of DS3, rather than leading me by the nose into a ship full of horrifying undead monsters or attempting to escape another Necromorph outbreak, I...end up shooting it out with a bunch of Unitologists???

Why are there cover based shooting segments in my Dead Space game?

Why are there cover based shooting segments in my Dead Space game?

Why are there cover based shooting segments in my Dead Space game?

Why...is...this...here?

Can anyone answer that? Though it’s not like it’s absolutely terrible or anything and the mechanics work fine, it’s just completely, totally, out of place.

This is what a friend of mine calls ‘Call of Duty bros’ gameplay. If I wanted to play a cover based third person shooter, I’d go play one. What I wanted, was to play a freaking Dead Space game.

Not this.

So, why?

I SHALL ENDEAVOR TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION.

Please do, SGR.

THE SO-CALLED ‘SURVIVAL HORROR’ GENRE WILL NEVER HAVE MASS MARKET APPEAL. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A NICHE MARKET, WHICH MINIMIZES POTENTIAL PROFIT. THE REASONS FOR THIS ARE MANIFOLD. SLOWER PACING, SENSE OF ISOLATION, UNSETTLING ATMOSPHERE, LACK OF PLAYER AGENCY, AND A HIGH LEVEL OF TENSION ARE HALLMARKS OF THE GENRE, BUT THEY ARE ALSO ITS DOWNFALL.

PUT SIMPLY, IF A SURVIVAL HORROR GAME DOES ITS JOB TOO WELL, IT BECOMES A THOROUGHLY UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE FOR THE PLAYER AND THUS, MOST PEOPLE WILL NOT PLAY IT.

That doesn’t explain why horror movies do so well.

VIDEO GAMES ARE AN INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE. THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE.

Interesting theory.

IN THE CASE OF THE DEAD SPACE GAMES AND INDEED, MOST SURVIVAL HORROR FRANCHISES, THE GAMES BECOME FASTER PACED AND THE FRIGHTENING ELEMENTS ARE TONED DOWN IN ORDER TO DRAW IN A LARGER CUSTOMER BASE.

*sigh*

I suppose that makes sense, but it runs the risk of alienating diehard fans, like myself.

THIS IS LARGELY IRRELEVANT. IF YOU CAN EXPAND THE CUSTOMER BASE SUFFICIENTLY, YOU WILL MAKE MORE MONEY. THAT IS WHY GAME COMPANIES DO THIS.

Yeah, I suppose.

DIEHARD FANS ARE NEVER PLEASED WITH SEQUELS IN ANY CASE. THE MORE OF THEM THERE ARE, THE MORE UNHAPPY YOU GET WITH THEM.

Hey. I liked Dead Space 2 a lot.

YOU STILL COMPLAINED THAT IT WAS NOT AS CREEPY AS THE ORIGINAL.

They almost never are, but we can still try, damn it.

THE MORE OF THEM YOU PLAY, THE MORE DESENSITIZED TO THIS SORT OF CONTENT YOU BECOME. CASE IN POINT, YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH “THE EVIL WITHIN.”

That game was a godawful mess. It’s hardly indicative of the quality of the genre....

Shit.

I’m completely wrong about this, aren’t I.

Most horror themed games are more miss than hit and a lot of them are experimental, clunky things that don’t do very well, especially in the indie scene. And big developers don’t seem that interested in making them anymore, with the exception of zombie killing simulators, of course.

It’s disheartening to see this happen to the Dead Space series. To me, it’s nothing more than dumbing it down for casual players and yes, I know how that makes me sound, thank you very much.

But this is hardly the end all, be all, summary of the complaints I have about this game.

Let’s dive right into the plot, shall we?

When last we left our intrepid hero, Isaac, Ellie had rescued him from certain death and the destruction of the Sprawl, a large, mostly civilian space station upon which the government unwisely located a facility devoted to the research and construction of the Markers, incredibly dangerous artifacts which cause horrific insanity, mutations, and death, whereupon the dead are promptly revived and twisted into undead abominations to prey upon the living.

Why did they do this?

I have no idea.

In fact, I don’t know why I really worry about these things anymore. It seems to me that almost everyone in the Dead Space universe is already stark, raving mad. No Markers and mysterious alien signals necessary.

And, since it worked so well, every other time they tried it, why not do it again?

Urgh.

That’s it, humanity straight up deserves to be wiped out in this universe. They are just too stupid to live.

So...so.

In the intervening time between DS2 and the start of DS3, Isaac and Ellie moved in together, had a relationship, and then Ellie dumped him due to what was probably crippling psychological problems from being exposed to the Markers in the previous games and literally being driven insane, after which he got better, but not all the way. Also he’s most likely suffering from PTSD due to surviving all of that crap in the first couple of games and who knows what else. It’s something of a miracle the dude can even manage to get up in the morning and have rational, human conversations with other people.

Now, most of this I just assume, because it is never shown to us. In fact, as short as this summary of mine is, it’s still shorter than what the game actually tells us.

Tells.

Us.

SGR, explain.

IT IS MUCH MORE EFFICIENT IN A MEDIUM LIKE THIS FOR A THE WRITER TO TELL THE AUDIENCE SOMETHING, RATHER THAN SHOW THEM. THAT WAY, YOU CAN GET STRAIGHT INTO THE ACTION WITH MINIMAL SETUP.

You...I....

Rrrrrggghhhhhh.

Is this what we’re doing now? Really?

Rather than take any time to have even the shortest of flashback scenes establishing Isaac and Ellie’s relationship, such as they did in the previous game with him and Nicole, all we have is a short narration and a voice message left by Ellie saying she’s leaving him, due to his unwillingness to help people.

Of all the asinine—!

Okay, calm down. Let’s break down why exactly this is utter and total bullshit.

Of the two of them, Ellie was far more interested in preserving her own skin in the previous game than Isaac was. He wanted to stop the madness and she wanted to get out of there alive, so this abrupt paradigm shift in both of them does not sit well with me. Suddenly Ellie is a bubbling idealist, out to save the universe, rather than the hardened survivor she was, and Isaac, who knows firsthand what happens when the Markers are used, is a pathetic shell of his former self, unwilling to set foot outside his door and bemoaning the loss of his new girlfriend.

Add to that the sheer fucking laziness of having their romance occur entirely offscreen and essentially being told what we should be feeling about it, just pisses me the hell off.

I like Isaac.

I like Ellie.

This is very jarring.

Oh but let’s not stop there, goodness me no. Let’s just rewrite Ellie entirely. Rather than have her as the competent, tough survivor she was in the second game, she is relegated immediately into the standard female role in video games. No, not the fanservicy one, the other one.

That’s right, the much maligned, yet somehow still constantly in use, ‘damsel in distress.’ The fuck is going on here? Ellie doesn’t need Isaac’s help. In fact, in the previous game, his help is directly responsible for her losing an eye and almost getting her killed rescuing him, but that’s just too progressive I guess.

Okay Isaac, go rescue your ex girlfriend, she’s in trouble! Or she is probably in trouble, or...whatever. She’s out actively trying to do something about this whole Marker mess and you’re huddling in your apartment.

It’s time to leave, dude, and who better to go on your crazy adventures with than Ellie, whoops, can’t use her cause she’s incompetent now, plus she’s a plot point rather than an actual character, used only for player motivation and pretty much nothing else.

Nope, rather than use an already established character for the third game’s coop campaign, we get to meet a total newcomer. And remember kids, only the manliest of men can join nerdish engineer Isaac Clarke on his Necromorph fighting missions.

Meet John Carver, one-note stereotype of an angry soldier. Carver is mad. He doesn’t like Isaac. He doesn’t like anybody. He’s short tempered and rude and tends to yell at people. His wife and kids were killed recently and he never spent enough time with them because of his job and ohmygodisthisbad.

Could we...maybe find someone even more unoriginal than angry soldier man to go on this mission with Isaac? I mean, I’m here actively trying to think of another horrible, flat, empty cliché character type we could pick that’s been overused as much as the space marine and I’m...I’m honestly coming up empty. I can’t think of one.

This is rock bottom.

There’s no way we can get any lower than...why? Why am I wrong about this? How does the plot get even more bland and cliché?

So essentially the player’s motivation is to go rescue your girlfriend, with a space marine for company. But that’s not all, the moment you meet up with Ellie, you find out that she’s already moved on and has another boyfriend, an unlikeable ponce named Norton. A pointless love triangle in my Dead Space game? The hell??  Norton is an idiot and I don’t like him, not because he’s in a relationship with Ellie, because of a bunch of stuff that happened off screen that I’m supposed to care about, but because he’s an asshat who nearly get’s everyone killed.

Dear whoever wrote this, I hate you.

Sincerely, me.

Why is it this way? Why is it Ellie exists only to provide motivation for Isaac to do things? Why does she pointlessly sacrifice herself in a moment of such sheer fucking stupidity that I almost shut the game off faster than you could say ‘emotional manipulation?’ It doesn’t stick of course, as she comes back just in time to be captured by the main antagonist of the game, Unitologist cult leader Danik. Why does she get captured so easily and why doesn’t she even try to fight back? If he had tried this bullshit in DS2, Ellie would’ve shoved her plasma cutter so far up his ass he would’ve been shitting light beams for a week. Now she just waits helplessly to be rescued and eventually gets sent off at the end of the game (properly this time, no coming back for Isaac this time around, you silly female) so that Isaac and Carver can make their manly heroic sacrifice at the end of the game.

Just...why?

I’m not even angry anymore. This shit is just disappointing.

It’s been done a thousand, thousand times before in countless other titles and I honestly wasn’t expecting to see stuff like this in Dead Space.

IF I MAY INTERJECT, YOUR OBJECTIONS ARE ILLOGICAL.

Oh this should be rich.

AN ANALYSIS OF AVAILABLE DATA SUGGESTS THAT THE MAJORITY OF FEMALES IN VIDEO GAMES ARE INCOMPETENT AND IN CHRONIC NEED OF RESCUING. WITNESS THE OTHER FEMALE CHARACTER IN DEAD SPACE 3 AS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THIS.

...

SHE EXISTS SOLELY FOR THE SAKE OF EXPOSITION AND TO PLAY THE ‘HYSTERICAL FEMALE’ ROLE. THESE ROLES ARE CHOSEN BY GAME DEVELOPERS, NOT DUE TO A LACK OF UNDERSTANDING ABOUT REAL LIFE WOMEN, BUT RATHER DUE TO MAKING A ‘SAFE BET’ ON TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES IN GAMING.

THEY KNOW THAT GAMERS HAVE SEEN THIS MANY TIMES BEFORE AND ARE MAKING SOMETHING THEY EXPECT AND RECOGNIZE. THIS MAXIMIZES THE POTENTIAL FOR EXPANDING THE GAME’S AUDIENCE AND MAXIMIZING PROFIT.

So...you’re whole argument can be summed up as, “Get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich???”

I DID NOT SAY THAT.

Sit there and look pretty, scream helplessly when you’re inevitably kidnapped, never actually rescue yourself, and above all else, trust us, the men are here to do everything for you. Oh and bonus points if you sacrifice yourself for the man.

When was this game made again? 2013?

I am NOT impressed.

YOUR OPINION IS IN THE MINORITY. WITNESS THE GAME’S HIGH REVIEW SCORE.

It doesn’t matter if my opinion is in the minority or not. This is a matter of principle damn it! That’s it, I’m shutting you off.

YOU ARE BEING ILLOGICAL. IF YOU WOULD ONLY ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN, I—.

There, peace and quiet at last.

Understand, please, that all of the things I’m objecting to don’t make this game bad, they make if fucking generic, which is not really the same thing. And while I might know what’s going on due to being exposed to these overused tropes as often as I have been, others probably won’t have the same reaction to it at all and might wonder why I’m bitching about it so much. After all, these things seem perfectly ordinary in most video games.

They seem normal, which they aren’t and should not be. And it’s just lazy and annoying. You could’ve tried. You could’ve done better. Hell, I could write a better script for the third Dead Space game than this.

Other than the godawful clichés I’ve seen a million times before, there’s also the whole reason behind where the Marker’s came from and the threat to the human race. All that stuff is still pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the primary antagonist is another one-note stereotype. He’s the new leader of Unitology and you can see his ugly mug on the giant screens floating over the colony you start the game in. Listen as Danik spouts generic and confusing rhetoric you’ve heard dozens of times before from crazy cult leaders just like him in other titles. Watch as he and his followers overthrow the Earth government and unleash the Marker replicas said government has stupidly built in every single colony they have.

What was that, you ask? Oh, that was the sound of humanity going extinct in this universe. It’s sad, I know, but remember, everything has to be bigger and more epic in sequel land. So rather than have a tight game where Isaac has to fight his way across the colony and destroy the Marker, that’s only the first half hour or so and then he takes off for parts unknown to rescue Ellie, because that’s what the dude the Unitologists call the ‘Marker killer’ really needs to be doing right now. No no, don’t try to destroy these things and save humanity Isaac, you need to go rescue Ellie.

And of course to the Uni’s, Isaac is public enemy number one, which is why you have to shoot your way through them in the beginning of the game.

But wait, you say. You’ve overlooked something.

Why yes, yes I have. There’s this whole other storyline involving a couple of characters on a military base on another planet in the middle of a snowstorm. They do some stuff and get killed and we end up finding out that it all took place two hundred years ago. In fact, this is what Ellie is investigating when you meet up with her after your escape from the colony.

There’s this ship graveyard orbiting a planet called Tau Volantis, and this is the coolest part of the game.

For some strange reason Ellie doesn’t bother warning anyone else that there’s an active minefield surrounding the ships, so when Isaac and co. warp in or whatever, they immediately slam into said mines and get their ship destroyed. Isaac and Carver manage to rescue some of the crew and join up with Ellie on one of the derelict ships, whereupon everyone goes their separate ways to try and scavenge enough parts to repair their only working shuttle.

Flying around in space is sheer joy.

You have the same controls as in the previous game and even more air, which is useful, due to the long periods where you travel from one derelict ship to another. There’s lots of rubble to explore and things to find and Necromorphs who crawl around on the wreckage who ambush you in the nearly noiseless environment. All of that is still quite excellent.

Unearthing the different stories on the ships is cool enough to practically be its own game, but alas, it’s over too quickly as everyone descends to the surface of the planet below.

They’ve managed to track the signal that is routed through the Markers to this planet. Remember, that signal? The one that drives people insane and transforms them into horrid undead abominations? Yep, this will end well.

In fact, it turns out that there is an entire planet full of Markers here.

I can honestly say that my blood ran cold when I first discovered that. I was legitimately terrified.

For a while anyway.

As with anything else, one of something is nigh indestructible, but you surround yourself with hundreds of them and suddenly you can destroy the things with small arms fire.

Wait, what?

Yeah, turns out you can destroy one of the alien Markers just by shooting it, which was so far outside of the realm of speculation for me that there were moments where the plot required me to destroy one, and I floundered helplessly, having no idea what to do. I only discovered it by accident when I was fighting the endless waves of enemies with one of my area of effect weapons.

Wow, just...wow.

Turns out Isaac has been using major overkill on these things. No need to drop a planet’s core on top of them or blow up the base where one is located, just shoot the damn things.

I refuse to believe that no one in the previous games tried this. This shit is ridiculous.

All of that aside, the game is actually pretty darn enjoyable to play. It’s nowhere near as dark as the previous titles in the series and I mean that literally as well as figuratively. Tau Volantis is a much brighter place and the view from space and from the ground is jaw dropping. The visuals are vivid and fantastical, making me wish I had the game on my PC so I could take screenshots. Alas, I refuse to get an Origin account and EA never released it on Steam, so that is not to be.

There are some major differences between single player and coop. I mentioned earlier that unless you play as the coop character, there are whole segments you will not see and it’s a damn shame, because these are some of the coolest parts of the game. In fact, these segments are pretty much the closest thing you get to survival horror in this whole title. Your experience will differ whether you play as Carver or Isaac.

Carver, having never been exposed to the Marker signal before, hears transmissions which draw him to a couple of different places. If you are playing as Carver, you will see and hear things that your coop partner playing as Isaac will not. If you’re playing as Isaac, there are times when Carver will just freeze in place and you have to protect him. It’s here you learn that Carver was an absentee father and feels like he failed his family. Despite how cliché that particular plot point is, these segments are actually a bit creepy. I liked these parts.

However, I would like to point out that if the devs had the coop player be Ellie, she could have explored the events in DS2 that lead to the deaths of her entire team, which would have been intense.

This was largely not.

Again, this is a case of the thing being okay/good, but it could have been great.

To quote popular game reviewer Angry Joe, “You done fucked it up!”

So what do you use to fight your way through the Unis and Necros? Well, I’m glad you asked as I have actually never seen anything quite like what they do here in DS3. You see, rather than collect a variety of different weapons and ammo like in the previous two titles, you collect weapon parts and put together your own arsenal. This allows for a crazy amount of weapon combinations, many of which are horribly impractical.

The larger weapon frames allow you to stack one gun on top of another, so you could, if you wanted to, stack two shotguns on top of each other, or put a chaingun on top of a seeker rifle, or a rocket launcher/mine thrower combination, or whatever. The combinations are almost endless. However, most of these just won’t work very well, so even though you could make yourself a crazy electric bola launcher/ripper combination, you’ll chew through ammo so fast it’s ridiculous.

Oh and all weapons use the same ammunition. As far as I can tell, it’s basically scrap metal, which you collect from mostly from little scavenger bots you find and deploy along the way. In fact, there’s a little minigame you’ll be playing constantly whenever you have a scavenger bot in your possession and things aren’t trying to kill you. This is basically a scavenger hunt. There’s a little radar on the back of the bot, telling you where lots of resources are. If you can find the place it beeps at you a certain way. Deploying the bot there nets you lots of resources, but you don’t have to. You can just drop them anywhere and get a constant stream of resources. The bots deploy for several minutes at a time and return with their payloads at whatever workbench you’re at.

I don’t really know how you can make infinitely variable ammo out of scrap metal, but what this effectively means is that some weapons are huge ammo soaks, while others are incredibly efficient. Basically, once you make a chaingun you’re likely to use it for the rest of the game, due to how little ammo consumption per shot it has. Usually the more powerful a gun is, the more ammunition it takes, which means you just won’t use them most of the time.

It’s an intriguing mechanic, but ultimately I don’t care for it.

I did manage to custom build some very cool things, I’ll admit. I have this one gun which shoots lightning through multiple enemies, with an underslung liquid nitrogen/acid thrower. Every shot I fire affects enemies with a slight stasis effect to slow them down. Unfortunately, as cool as it is, I don’t use it much due to the high number of injuries I get while wielding it. Mostly I just use a chaingun combo with the kinetic gun that knocks enemies away from me if they get too close.

The reason I don’t like the new weapon system much is fairly straightforward. It takes some of my favorite toys from the previous Dead Space titles and renders them straight up unusable. This is mostly due to nothing having any sort of alternative firing mode any more. You sacrifice that function for the ability to stack two guns on top of each other.

Remember the seeker rifle? It was such a joy to use in the previous games, but now you can’t zoom in on things with it. I mean, you can add a scope attachment, but there’s no button to allow you to toggle it, which means you are always scoped in, which is objectively horrible. Or you can just not have a scope at all and try to shoot fast moving targets with a critically ammo intensive gun.

Why would I ever use this again?

Oh and the mine gun. Oh how I loved this thing in DS2. Here it’s almost completely pointless to try and use. The mines are timed, they do less than half the damage they used to and there’s no way to recover them. Also pretty ammo intensive.

No amount of customization will make most of the weapon types effective and efficient in combat. You can try it if you want to, but they are largely a huge waste of time and resources. Just find one gun that works well on most enemies with a backup for boss fights and you’re good.

And that right there is the problem. We were better off with the old system of multiple single types of weapons, each with their own unique primary and alternate fire modes. Sure that meant a whole lot of different ammo types, rather than one generic type of scrap metal ammo that magically transforms itself into whatever ammunition the gun you’re using takes. That’s okay though.

Honestly I’m kind of glad you guys tried this, just to see something different, but the old system worked better.

Oh and don’t bother buying weapon blueprint DLC’s. Huge waste of money. Just build something of your own that works. No need for annoying microtransactions.

So how about the iconic combat/space suits? Those are usually pretty good, right?

Well...here they’re mostly snowsuits for use on Tau Volantis. Honestly I don’t care for the designs. Isaac has like, one suit which looks like it came from DS2 and I like that one, but most of the others don’t do it for me. Rather than the rusty, armored baddass look of the original mining suit from DS, or the sleek, animeish futuristic space suits from DS2, we get...a bunch of designs that look like they came out of a modern day arctic sportswear catalog and a couple of godawful looking space suits?

Well, if that’s your thing, I guess.

Man, some of these just look awful, and they did away with the individual stat bonuses of the previous game, so once you find one you like, just stick with it. Odds are, the new ones aren’t any better.

In this area, Carver has much cooler looking suits than Isaac does, including his original red and black space soldier armor he starts the game with.

I should like to point out something about the enemy types. The iconic Necromorphs from the previous games do return, but I spent an inordinate amount of time fighting glowy eyed zombies with pickaxes, which just made me kind of scratch my head and go, “Eh, this is alright I guess.”

It’s just not the same.

Though the game does have a lot of different types of gameplay, I feel like it’s a weird hybrid of stuff from the previous games and weird stuff they just added cause it was different.

Here’s what you’ll do in Dead Space 3:

Watch as humanity is doomed by sheer idiocy and horrible clichés.

Escape from a colony being overrun by Necromorphs.

Discover annoying and aggravating side plots involving characters you used to respect.

Fly around in space searching for that one spot you can’t seem to find on the little bot radar telling you where the goodies are.

Spend most of the game tinkering with your gun and dropping little robots all over the place to collect resources for you to do more tinkering.

Make a flamethrower/grenade launcher. This is a terrible idea.

Use it anyway, just to see what happens.

Clear optional levels and get boxes full of gun parts and circuits for even more tinkering!

Fly a shuttle through a space minefield and crash land the thing on Tau Volantis, damaging your suit in the process so it no longer produces heat.

Wander though an icy hell, running from fire to fire to prevent yourself from freezing to death.

Acquire your first ugly snowsuit!

Play cooperatively with a friend and experience a large amount of content you’ll miss out on in single player.

Get disconnected from the Playstation Network and have to restart your coop campaign from the last checkpoint.

Explore the remains of a two hundred year old human expedition to the planet, which somehow still has compatible technology with what you’re using now.

Go extreme ice climbing and rappelling.

Romp around inside a giant alien corpse, fighting what may be alien antibodies? They’re little annoying shadow people that climb on top of you and hit real hard.

Find a few more ugly snowsuits. No, none of them really look any better.

Have another boss fight with the Hive Mind, the final boss from the first game.

Play the weirdest (or coolest) jigsaw puzzle you’ve ever seen, involving sliced up, frozen chunks of a telepathic alien.

Uncover the mystery of the Markers once and for all.

Doom humanity even more through your actions.

Fight a moon sized alien by using telekinesis to shoot Markers into its eye! (seriously)

Finish the campaign and watch as Isaac and Carver heroically sacrifice themselves to stop the Marker signals once and for all.

Wait till the end of the credits and hear Isaac’s voice, confirming that he’s not actually dead.

Turn game off, feeling somewhat satisfied that you’ve finished things at last.

Turn the game back on later, after buying the DLC campaign.

Convince friend to buy DLC as well.

Play through the DLC, which has Isaac and Carver apparently survive a fall from near orbit heights, with broken helmets, in the middle of a hurricane, while a moon sized alien crashes into Tau Volantis.

Find a shuttle.

Go into orbit and fight your way through a bunch of Unitologists who have taken over the derelict ships up there.

Have a shootout with Carver/Isaac, depending on who you’re playing, largely due to a disagreement about whether it’s a good idea or not to go home.

Fly to Earth.

Realize there’s actually no way the writers can get themselves out of the corner they’ve written themselves into with the conclusion of the DLC.

Mourn the last and final entry in the Dead Space series, but who knows, maybe they’ll reboot it or something!

And that’s just about it.

Is DS3 fun to play? Yes. Does it look fantastic? It really does. The gameplay is solid and coop is fun, if you can get someone else to play it with you. The plot is a mixed bag. For every lazy, awful, cringe worthy plotpoint, there’s some other pretty cool stuff elsewhere, you just have to ignore the personalities and motivations of the main characters and their primary antagonist.

The atmosphere is mostly one of exploration, with a bunch of fighting thrown in and some really cool setpieces like the derelict space fleet floating in orbit around Tau Volantis. This entry is thematically weaker in almost every respect if you like horror elements like tension, isolation, desperation, and disempowerment. Thematically stronger if you like shooting things with a friend and don’t care much about any of that stuff.

Final verdict:

You could have done better and I expected better of you, so I am pretty disappointed with this entry. I’ve played through it twice and I would still recommend it, however, so make of that what you will.

Oh and only once in this whole game did anything tell me to “Make us whole.” That’s...actually pretty damn disappointing too. No more whispers. No more insanity. No more uber creepy renditions of children’s songs. It’s not that there aren’t horrible monsters or anything, it’s just that the previous titles were so much bloodier and darker than this one, that by comparison, I cannot in good conscience call this true survival horror.

It’s kind of ‘survival horror lite,’ but it’s not quite intense enough to be a pure action horror title. Lightweights might find it creepy, but I don’t. I’d say it ranks a “Resident Evil 5” on the scare o’ meter.

In case you were wondering, that’s really not scary at ALL.