The Tiny Bang Story

The Tiny Bang Story is the kind of game you pick up because it's a daily deal for $2.50, it has a demo, and you have 30 minutes to kill before you need to get to work, so you decide you might as well give it a try, and then, 30 minutes later, you realize you still really want to complete the puzzle you were in the middle of, so you buy it. At least that's what I did.

This is not a fancy AAA game. Rather it is a simple, relaxing game. You explore several beautiful levels, interacting with items, people, and puzzles, to unlock new zones within your current level, and ultimately, new levels themselves.

There are four puzzle pieces, two different quest items (packages + the dial in the bookcase), and a security camera that reveals more items behind the desk.

Searching for items is what you'll probably spend most of your time in this game doing. You see, as you're exploring, you find that you can only move a frame or two in any direction, such as being limited to the base of a tower in the very first level because the ladder that goes higher is missing several rungs, or that someone indicates the are looking for an item such as a painting. This then activates a quest to uncover the item or items needed. In the event that you're looking for items like the aforementioned rungs to a ladder, you'll end up scouring through what part of the level you've unlocked, taking time to look at every little item around, because generally what you need is hidden as a detail on a structure, or is disguised against something else, such as the handle on the backside of a hatch. When you finally find all the pieces you need, you can complete the quest and access more of the level.

Finding items in this game is akin to searching through the pictures in the Highlights magazine at the doctor's office. You know, the one where the crayon is disguised as a tree trunk.

Other times, such as when you need to find that painting to progress, you actually need to complete a puzzle. There are a number of these throughout the game, and most are reminiscent of the kind of fun little puzzles you'd do as a kid, or that you could pick up for a few dollars inside a museum, such as trying to figure out how to fit a collection of Tetris like blocks nicely inside a rectangular area, or decoding secret messages from the inside of a cereal box. You'll find yourself building a locomotive, twisting two Venn diagram like circles in such a way as to split up three different colors, or piecing back together the tattered remnants of a family painting. These ultimately unlock some kind of reward that is required elsewhere, or is the final step before completing the level.

The left circle rotates 180 degrees, and the right 90. Probably one of the harder puzzles in the game.

To complete The Tiny Bang Story you'll have to search high and low for all of the items you'll need throughout the level. To further complicate things, there is far more than just what you see on screen at any one time, because you'll soon realize that many different objects can be interacted with, such as clicking on a closet to open it up, where you'll ultimately find that last valve you need to progress. Combine that with the fact that you'll generally have several quests that are active concurrently, and that many of them are interdependent, such that the very last light bulb and that one wrench you need are both locked away in the same trunk, and you'll soon realize that you cannot leave any stone unturned. So you must be thorough, and remember that what looks like a fancy lock on a chest or a unimportant security camera are actually keys to progressing.

As I stated, this is a pretty simple game. The attractive art and calming music make it the sort of thing you'll do for a little while when you probably should be doing something more productive. With about 20 puzzles and several levels to search through, you'll buy yourself about 3 hours worth of distraction. The Tiny Bang Story is ultimately an average game, one that feels about the same as playing a few rounds of solitaire or FreeCell instead of writing a paper or paying the bills, and with such a short play time, the $2.50 I paid seems about right - 5 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 5/10

Suggested Price: $2.50

Hard Reset

I am not sure where I first heard about Hard Reset, but I immediately tried the demo, and decided it was a game to keep an eye out for. Eventually it rolled around on sale, and I snatched it up right away, which was good, because I was looking for a new shooter to get into, and Hard Reset most certainly satisfied that itch.

Hard Reset is a fast paced shooter wherein you take on a veritable horde of killer robots, which range in size and variety from small ones with various means of dismembering your body, to large "gorillas" that seem to be in a competition to see which one can punt you the furthest. It is not an endless slaughterfest, and there are a few puzzles in the game, which largely take the form of requiring your to open up doors or passage ways to progress, though in reality those are brief respites between the larger waves of enemies you'll encounter.

These guys + tight spaces = death.

The weapons in the game are a little funny. Rather than having a wide variety of firearms to choose from, you have two - an impact round gun, which is to say it shoots bullets, and an electrical type weapon. However, as you kill enemies or explore levels, you'll gather points that you can use to purchase upgrades at the correct booths. Many of these upgrades are for your weapons, though there are some for your character as well. Those focused on weapons offer different modes of action, such as taking your traditional gun, which functions as a machine gun, and giving you the ability to use it as a shotgun or RPG. Similarly, the electricity gun can also function as a mortar, railgun, or smartgun that fires a homing projectile that can go through walls. All in all, you can use upgrades to turn your two base weapons into a total of 10, each with it's own secondary function and a bonus modifier that does things like increase the effective radius of your mortar weapon, which is one of my favorites because the secondary function on that weapon temporarily freezes enemies within it. The one downside is that each weapon still requires the same ammo as it's respective base, so it doesn't matter if you're using it as an assault rifle or shotgun, when it hits 0, you're out either way.

Just as critical as your weapons, are upgrades to your character, which cover things like unlocking, and then upgrading, a HUD, or changing the amount of damage you take. Others increase the health or ammo you gain when you find resupply packs. Just as with your weapons, some of the upgrades require others to unlock, so to get, say, the RPG, you'll find you need to first unlock the shotgun. The end result is that you'll need to find plenty of upgrade points to get the items you're looking for, and I'm not actually sure if you can get everything, considering that I only managed to acquire a handful of upgrades myself. Who knows, maybe I'm just bad about exploring and did not find all those secret nooks where the useful stuff is hidden.

There are, in a way, far too many upgrades for my taste. Great options, but I fail at finding enough upgrade points to get them all.

I do normally like to talk about the story involved in a game, since it is an important aspect of many games. With Hard Reset however, I am really at a loss for words. There's all this talk of A.I.s: internal AI vs. external AIs, and important AI matrices. Other seemingly important story points include someone letting in killer robots into this safe area, a disease, and the ability to absorb people's minds. Really, I had no idea what was going on here, and I'm generally a hard one to trip up, at least when compared to those I know (I'm still baffled people don't understand Inception, which I've been told is "hard"). The conclusion I finally came to about the story was this: "what the heck do I care, I get to shoot homicidal robots!"

Unfortunately, those homicidal robots shoot back.

Instead, the drive to beat this games comes from how challenging it is, and it is challenging, even on the lower difficulties. This comes from a variety of sources, such as the surprising number of little enemies, which are all very fast, those huge enemies which are also very fast and much more powerful, the damage that everything deals, the accuracy of those that have turrets or some other form of gun, and so on. Moral of the story is you take a lot of damage, and very quickly, if you aren't careful. Sometimes that's as easy as avoiding explosive barrels that will most likely cause your doom when they invariably explode due to enemy fire. At other points, you just have to be aware of enemies that appear under boxes, or fall from crates, and essentially never let you guard down.

The level of difficulty in this game is further amplified by the checkpoint save system, something for which the game was heavily criticized upon release, and which was eventually altered to add many more checkpoints throughout the game. I can not speak to what the game was originally like, but there were a few times I found myself frustrated by the system, since I would seem to die on the last wave of a particularly tough area, and thus be forced to replay the last few minutes, all of which were challenging. However, rather than just complain about the fact, I viewed it as yet another challenge that had to be overcome, essentially limiting the margin of error you can experience before failing, rather than if the game had a quicksave system, letting you save immediately between waves, and thus requiring you to only perform well in bursts, rather than over a sustained period. In short, this game is challenging, and it does not coddle you like so many recent games (I'm looking at you Infinity Ward), since you actually have to be pretty good to make progress. And that...is a good thing.

For the competition oriented, there is even a score given out at the end of each level.

 Altogether Hard Reset its a very good game. I applaud the challenge presented within it, though when I look at my score, it is atrocious. The weapons were fun, particularly those on the electrical gun that can see through walls, such as the rail gun when zoomed in or the smart gun all the time, and the variety made it possible to develop various strategies for dealing with the different types of enemies. One I found myself using often was, when fighting the large gorillas, to pull out my mortar gun, and fire one time stopping shot, followed by one regular shot that would spit out electricity from the point it landed at for a few seconds. I would follow that up by quick swapping to the bullet powered gun, and pull out a grenade launcher. A few direct hits can make a world of difference when you're trying to dodge an incredibly fast enemy that likes to charge at you in a tight tunnel environment.

The art style was beautiful, even when I was trying to blow everything up and turn the environment itself into a tool against my enemies even though it was more often used against me, and the deserted cityscape, all scifi of course, was a bit eerie, though given enough time, I found myself longing for something different. I also can't help but feel I'm missing something major in the story, and that is a bit depressing. Still, Hard Reset makes for a good way to spend a couple of hours on the base game, 5 in my case, especially if you can find it under the $10 mark, since there is now a free DLC that adds in a few extra levels. That's good, because this game is surprisingly short, containing only 7 levels. If you're looking for something a bit different than the AAA shooters we've been getting lately, pick up Hard Reset soon, because while you'll be frustrated, you won't be disappointed - 8 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 8/10

Suggested Price: $10

Renegade Ops

So what do you do when a madman threatens to burn down the world, and the world seems content to do nothing? Well, if you're General Bryant, the top military official for an organization that would appear to be the U.N., you abandon your post and lead a collection of renegades to go out and do the job the world's governments won't do.

In Renegade Ops, you take on the role of one of Bryant's renegades, an individual with more than a few screws lose, as your goal is to save the world from the terrorist known as Inferno by, get this, driving a single car with a machine gun strapped to it. Yes, that should be completely effective against armies of infantry, attack helicopters, and tanks.

Realistic? No. Fun? Heck yes.

There are four regular characters available in the base game, one special tribute for the Steam edition in the form of Gordon Freeman, and two additional characters if you purchase the correct DLC. Each character, in addition to driving a unique vehicle, also has a special ability. My favorite character, Roxy, can summon an air strike, which really comes in handy when you're getting swarmed by enemies. Other special abilities include turning your car into what is essentially an artillery turret, a temporary shield you can use to avoid extremely damaging attacks like enemy rockets, or summon a swarm of antlions to attack those pesky tanks.

Each character can be further differentiated through the use of their skill trees. Yes, this is a driving game where you shoot things with machine guns, rocket launchers, flame throwers, or just run over generic henchmen, and it has skill trees. As you play through the game, you'll get points for any damage you cause. You can string together damage streaks for even more points. All of those get added up, and you will eventually level up your current driver. When you level up, you get a few points to spend on talents, which are broken down into three categories - offensive, defensive, and tactical, which is the proper name for the special ability. Offensive lets you start with a secondary weapon, or increase the clip size of those weapons, while defense focuses on things like slowly regenerating your health when you're low, or having the chance to drop health packs from your own vehicle when you take damage. Tactical is specific to your character - in the case of Roxy, you can unlock larger air strikes, or ones that launch without delay. There are a total of 6 skills in each tree, and you have to unlock one to get the one above it. Furthermore, you can only have 4 skills active per level, though you only start with 2 open slots. By the time you reach level 45, the cap, you should have everything covered.

Skill trees? Let the theorycrafting begin!

Of course, those skill trees only enhance the fundamental gameplay, but do not drastically change it. While it is nice to have extremely powerful special abilities, or more ammo for your secondary weapon, most of the time you'll be killing things with your machine gun. This too is upgradeable, since, as you're slaughtering enemies, you'll encounter a variety of crates, which offer health, one of the game's three secondary weapons which you can switch out if you already have one equipped, ammo for your secondary, or add extra machine guns to your car. These are also the sort of thing you tend to lose if you die, so it's in your best interest to stay alive as long as possible, dodging in and out of the line of fire or using your special ability to deal with particularly tough enemies, since it does really suck to lose your level four machine gun, rail gun secondary with full ammo, and that nice kill streak you had going just because you took a turn too fast and ended up flipping over...right in front of a tank.

The story in this game is told in comic book style, with frames popping up on screen during the mission or just cut scenes before and after levels. It all fits in very well, though some times it is a little...over the top. For example, the antagonist, Inferno, always seems to be broadcasting from the pits of hell, judging by the flames behind him. Or the few times during the game when you must mash your A button - and yes, that's button, not key, because the game advises you to use a gamepad - to defeat enemies guarding a bridge or door control off screen, which causes another comic book like window to pop up showing your character beating the heck out of World War I German doppelgangers. My personal favorite though, is one cut scene in which General Bryant punches someone, and then follows it up with "How's that for a punch-line?"

If they ever made a movie out of this, that line could only be delivered by Samuel L. Jackson.

The missions themselves are pretty straight forward. You'll have a variety of objectives that evolve throughout the level, such as rescuing prisoners, destroying specific targets, or out racing a bomb blast. Some levels also have additional secondary objectives, which are a great way to increase your points total. However, you shouldn't dillydally too much, because the mission is actually timed, though you'll only find that out if you aren't prompt about completing your main objective, because after a time things will suddenly slow down, the music will dull, the screen goes black and white, and then a clock appears, letting you know to get a move on it. Thankfully, you can pull up a map overlay on the center of your screen, so you know just where to head to, which is good for you, but not so good for the prisoners who suddenly won't be getting rescued.

The game plays well enough, particularly if you fallow the recommendation and use a gamepad, in my case an Xbox controller, because those double joysticks are nice for driving in one direction and firing in another. You'll quickly learn what tactics work best with various enemies, such as dodging mortar strikes, or taking off the armor plating on the back of a tank to expose it's weak point. At that point it becomes a matter of just how good of a driver you are, and how accurate you are with your various weapons and special abilities, all of which you'll need to utilize if you want to get those really high scores.

Unfortunately, Bam, Pow, and Wham, are not included.

There are a total of nine levels in Renegade Ops, and if you're into that short of thing, you can go back and play them again and again to grind up your character's level, or just try and set the highest score you can. The three levels of difficulty can assist with this, since you can earn more points, but at the cost of extra lives on higher difficulty settings. It took me about 5 hours to play through the whole game on normal, and I generally had a positive experience, except for those times when I did in fact roll my car over in front of a tank. Still, the explosions, the feeling of destroying buildings by crashing through them, and the experience of successfully taking out a tank that is surrounded by several rocket turrets was pretty satisfying.

I had really only picked this up because it was associated with a Steam achievement contest, but am happy with my purchase, particularly since the version I got came with both DLCs for one low price. While I haven't gotten around to the Coldstrike DLC yet, I would still recommend looking for the game around the $5 mark. This game is above average, and something I would recommend, but not something that is so good I am likely to come back to it and grind up, or test out the multiplayer mode, rather holding off until there is a new campaign or something much more substantial to delve into - 6 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 6/10

Suggested Price: $5

Limbo Video Review

The video review for Limbo is now available

Magicka Video Review

The video review for Magicka is now available.

Sequence

 **Be sure to check out the video review!** 

Sequence is yet another game I picked up because it was involved in the Steam 2011 winter sale achievement contest. When I originally looked at the games involved for that day, I noticed that Sequence was $1.25 or so, at which point I'd almost certainly pick it up, since it was so little. I did want to read a little about the game first though, just to see if it would be something I'd at least be interested in playing, or if it was something I should just pass on, and at that price, it would take a fair amount for that. I literally read the following before backing out: "Sequence combines elements of both rhythm and role-playing games..." That's right, I didn't even make it through the first sentence before deciding it wasn't worth my money, because I don't know if there is anything I'm worse at than rhythm games, though the few attempts I've ever made at DDR in public have drawn cheers, but only because it is so easy to find pleasure in the failure of others.

Later in the day, I thought I'd at least read the rest of the game description, and maybe watch the videos. Both trailers, one of which shows off the mechanics of the game, while the other is simple an encouragement to buy it, were full of humor, such as the following gem from the trailer that explains the underlying mechanics "Honestly, if you don't understand how hitpoints work, this game probably...probably isn't for you. Go download some...apps...or something." It was this, as well as several other witticisms throughout the two trailers, that tipped my mind, and so I picked up the game, thinking that $1.25 wasn't a bad price to pay for it.

Unfortunately, I was terribly, terribly wrong. Though it's not what you think. I didn't pay too much for this game. I paid too little.

At least I can play this in the privacy of my own home, so no one can see when I fail like this.

Sequence is a beautiful mix of two extremely different genres, rhythm and RPG, with one of the best stories and character development I have ever seen in a game. You play as Ky, a young male who was kidnapped and brought to the mysterious tower, a place where monsters are trying to kill you, and the only way to make it out alive is to take the help your guide provides you to survive all seven levels and their respective guardians. In this case, your guide is Naia, who provides plenty of back and forth conversation with Ky as she generally tries to keep him from getting himself killed.

Combat in Sequence occurs through the rhythm portion of the game. After selection of one of your current floor's three potential opponents to battle, which you do by exiting the safe room you spend all your down time in, the music for that particularly badie starts to play. You'll see three screens, or as the game refers to them, fields. They correspond with your attack, incoming damage, and mana regeneration. However, you can only have one field active at a time, so you must switch to whatever will be the most beneficial to be active in. This usually means you'll only be in the mana field, which is your only way to regenerate the fuel for your attacks, when there isn't a cascade of incoming damage en route. If you're completing an attack, by flawlessly executing the required moves, you may just have to take the damage, trading blows until one of you is dead, since you do need to beat the time limit for the song. As you progress, the enemies get harder, not only sending more attacks at you, but also sending attacks that are worth much more than a single hp, which is denoted by the different colored arrows, so while it isn't too bad if you let white or green ones through, which deal one or two damage each, you really need to stop those red ones, dealing 10 damage, and if there are enough coming, you may just break off your attack, or try and grab them in the small break you have between groups of arrows.

The enemy selection screen provides all kinds of useful information, including the break down of the enemy attacks. This guy has a 50-50 split between white and yellow, or one and three damage attacks.

The rest of the game, that is, everything out of combat and non-story related, is RPG, and even here you'll find humor. It starts when Naia explains the stat values to Ky, covering things like Offense, Defense, and HP, and Ky questions why he's a five. Naia's response is simply because he looks like a five. It continues by making references to the seemingly arbitrary stat system found in many RPGs, or the proper pronunciation of mana. You'll even find humor in the item descriptions, such as the weapon Sonic Disruptor, which is super effective against hedgehogs. That sort of humor is pervasive in this game, and is a nice juxtaposition with the at times seriousness of the main story. But back to the RPG stuff.

As you successfully defeat enemies, you earn experience points, and begin to level up, increasing your stats in the process. However, experience also serves a crucial role as the currency in this game, as it's the cost to synthesize an item, by combining the raw materials you'll sometimes get from enemies, as well as the cost of learning a new spell, which you accomplish by successfully beating a challenge, like continuing a perfect combo on a song for a certain number of beats or maintaining a high accuracy. When making new items, which is a must as they augment your stats, you can choose to spend more or less experience in the process, which increases or decreases your odds of success. You can only go up to 95% though, and it takes a whole heck of a lot of points to get that high, to the point that you can easily lose a couple of levels for the chance to make an item. That's right, you can actually go down in level in this game if you're not careful with how you spend your points. And even if you choose to up the success rate, maybe not to 95%, there is still that chance of failure, in which case you don't lose the materials, but all those experience points go bye bye for nothing.

Since I never throw away anything, even in a video game, you can view my inventory of the various items you can craft.

When you begin each new floor in the tower, you'll be given a stack of recipes, which require various items, usually specific to that floor, to make. Each of the three enemies on a floor have three possible drops, but they very in rarity from extremely common, to the other end of the spectrum, where you'll find yourself repeatedly grinding away on the same enemy in hopes to finally get the last Uranium-235 you need to make your next piece of gear. You'll usually end up with a surplus of other items, which is fine, because you can just desynthesize those for some additional experience.

While the gameplay is interesting, and the crafting system is different than anything I've seen before, it's really the story that makes this game so good. The quality of the voice acting is superb, and all the interactions are well done, particularly Ky and Naia, all of which just results in a deeper, and more believable, experience. As the relationship between Ky and Naia develops, as you start to learn more about this strange place called the tower, and as you discover some of the secrets it holds, you can't help but to want to find out more. If you take the time to craft a special item, you can even unlock an additional ending that provides you with more information, but ultimately leaves you asking more questions, the forefront of those being "When is Sequence 2 coming out?!?"

I think I have successfully pulled off that attack once. I wouldn't even think of trying it on piano jam. That song is just evil.

The combat is fun, and it can be challenging to defeat certain enemies, particularly the guardians at the end of each floor. You'll need to carefully pick your spells, such as one that reduces the likelihood of high incoming damage, a damage over time attack, a heal, and a big direct attack, in accordance with your need, and your skill in executing the required moves to actually cast it, because some of the high end spells, in addition to costing more mana and having a longer cool down, are really hard to pull off. The crafting system, particularly with it's use of experience as a currency, is pretty interesting, but there is the downside that sometimes it just seems like you absolutely cannot get that last item you need to drop, and so you keep fighting the same guy over and over and over, and at times, that grind can get old, especially since this game could have used one or two more songs to mix things up a bit, though everything included is great. The story is one I wouldn't mind just watching start to finish, to hell with the rest of the game, and it is a good game too. All in all, I got about 11 hours of game time out of Sequence, but I will admit I played on "Easy - For those musically challenged." rather than risk it on "Medium - for those musically challenged, yet stubborn." which actually got me a 100% complete game, even covering the little augmented reality game that's included. I do highly recommend this game, and even if you're bad at rhythm games, like I am, just go for the easy difficulty and enjoy the rest of the experience. Oh, and pay full price, because it's more than worth it - 10 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 10/10

Suggested Price: $5, only because it doesn't cost more

Dead Space 2

Sequels always leave me a little unsettled. I talked before about the difficulties that must face developers of a sequel, considering what to change, if those changes will be well received by the gamers, and so on. Though I mostly hate that sequels make for longer reviews, because it's usually important to have played the first game, thus I ultimately end up covering a bit of both. Dead Space 2 is but one example where it is important to understand the significance and the style of the original game in order to fully appreciate, or disapprove of, the changes brought forth in the next iteration of the series.

I found the first Dead Space to be a great game, though not without it's fair share of issues, particularly on the PC. One of the key things that made the game so good was the atmosphere - that creepy/paranoid feeling you'd get since enemies could suddenly burst out of the numerous vents scattered throughout every room, thus requiring you to always be on guard. Additionally, the game moved along at a slower clip than most other games in the action category, thereby building the suspense of waiting for the next guy that wants to eat your face to jump out at you, and could be best compared to some of the classic Resident Evil games.

Actually Resident Evil is a pretty good comparison, with the generally slower pace of the game, and levels that largely involved you starting at one point, solving puzzles, killing enemies, and so forth, until you make it to the deepest part of the level, and then coming all the way back to the start, usually encountering some new enemies in areas you thought you already cleared, or being punished for not taking the proper precaution with bodies. They also share a "save at certain points in the game only" system and an inventory system for managing your arsenal of weapons and general lack of ammo. Heck, you could even call the mutated corpses that are the Necromorphs of Dead Space zombies, and you wouldn't be too far off.

 

If I had any talent whatsoever in Photoshop or another graphics program, I might try and merge that with the Resident Evil 2 title screen.

Perhaps what the series is most known for though, is the strategic dismemberment system, where the best way to kill enemies is to cut off their appendages. This of course flies in the face of every instinct I've developed from years of playing FPS games, which is to shoot it in the head, and makes Dead Space pretty unique. Usually I'll aim for the legs on an enemy first, using a weapon that fires a horizontal beam to main them to the point they collapse on the ground, dragging their bodies towards me with their remaining limbs. This will buy you critical breathing room when dealing with multiple enemies at once, and then you use a vertical firing weapon to pick of the arm or two needed to finish them off. Interestingly enough, this all generally requires a fair amount of accuracy, so those head shot skills still come in handy.

The final bit of background on Dead Space worth mentioning before moving onto the sequel involves the story. Dead Space was set on a space ship, the USG Ishimura, which became a ghost ship after a strange artifact known as the marker, the center piece of a religion called Unitology that the devs swear is in no way based on Scientology, that apparently reanimates dead flesh into these bizarre monsters that proceed to kill everything in sight. You play Isaac Clarke, an engineer sent on a repair team to find out why the Ishimura has dropped out of contact, but with the ulterior motive of finding his girlfriend Nicole, who is aboard that same ship. The trailer, which provides you with this same background, makes for good watching, and it seems like, in the right hands, the game could make a great movie (one is currently in development).

Nicole, sometime before things get really, really bad in the first game.

The rest of the story is just as good. You get separated from your team, and everything gets really bad, really fast. I won't go into details, but when you start learning the motives behind different characters' actions, who lives and who dies, and just what is really real, you'll see why I enjoyed the game. Oddly enough, Isaac suffers from that whole mute and no face syndrome that many other protagonists have throughout gaming history, like Samus Aran. This does seem a bit strange, particularly when people are going into a  monologue about what you need to do, letting you know you'll be headed into a dangerous area, and you never once speak out and say that's a bad idea, or you'll get right on it, or give any reply to indicate you are, in fact, human.

To one extent or another, all these things are changed in the sequel. Sometimes the result is better, while at others, it is worse.

Take the atmosphere of the game as one example. Dead Space 2 does not have the same slow, paranoia building feel to it that the first game does. New enemies that, while attacking in hordes, allow you to be far less meticulous with your shot placement, new weapons that even include a sniper rifle, and an environment that rarely requires you to back track into areas you've already visited, and are either rewarded or punished for properly disposed of bodies or not, all change the pace of the game, and allow you to play it much more as an action game than a survival/horror experience, as with the first one. Actually, there were only a handful of fear inducing moments in this game, but there were all "jumpy," usually involving a body falling out of the ceiling in an otherwise deserted room.

My personal favorite for creepy game moments: A washing machine that has a crying sound coming from inside of it.

Some of these more action oriented changes make for improvements, such as the ability to free float in zero-g situations, rather than the slow jump from point to point of the original. Others, like the addition of the new javelin weapon, which is essentially a spear launcher, are fun, but unnecessary, as I just used my trustworthy weapon set from the first game, which consists of the Plasma Cutter, Riffle, Flamethrower, and Line Gun, to handle anything the game threw at me. New enemies, like the stalkers that like to hide behind walls or crates, and generally work as a group to attack you, that is, when they finally charge around the corner from wherever they are hiding, are interesting, but not groundbreaking.

The story in the sequel simply is not as good. Isaac wakes up three years after the events of the first game, with no memory of the time that has past in between. Things have started going to hell on the Sprawl, a gigantic space station, which you must escape, just like you did the Ishimura. Thankfully, over the course of three years, Isaac has learned how to talk. Admittedly, that does do some damage to the horror aspect of the game, but the trade off is it does wonders for the character development, since he can actually develop relationships with other character in the game, making attempts to keep people calm, or express concern about the plan a mysterious benefactor has outlined for his survival, all of which make Isaac more relatable, but do place his emotions in place of what the player might naturally experience, and at times, you wonder if the voice actors had the proper motivation, or where in the right emotional state, to really sell the whole "I'm being attacked by mutated corpses that come back to life and want to kill me when I just want to get off this ship" vibe.

One of the more colorful characters you'll meet in Dead Space 2.

There are two ways to look at the changes in Dead Space 2. Either you consider them in light of the original, which you are like to do if you've played both, or you look at it as it's own separate game. If you held the previous game in high regards, unfortunately, Dead Space 2 is not that game, though Dead Space 3 looks like it will fall much further into the solidly action category. While all the mechanics of the original are there, from upgrading your equipment to combat techniques, the feel just isn't the same. In the first game, for example, you weren't in danger of being sucked out a broken window into the vacuum of space unless you shot the close window switch in time. The game is just more of an action game than survival/horror, and so while I'd still advise trying it out, don't expect the same thing as before.

If you look at the game separately, or potentially with the passage of enough time between playing 1 and 2, then this is a pretty good game. The shift towards action suits my style more, and I definitely approve of the quicker pace of the game. I really enjoyed the greater character development found in this game, and while it didn't have the same number of twists as the last game did, there are still a few curve balls in the story I hadn't seen coming. I do miss some of the puzzles found in the first game, and am very disappointed that PC gamers get zero DLCs for this game, as I was particularly looking forward to one that follows some of the characters from Dead Space Extraction, which I've also played, but at least you can rebind keys this time, and don't need a 360 controller to play. The game is good enough that I would even consider playing through it again at some point, though not on the hard core difficulty, which only grants you three saves and you revert to your last save on death, because I don't want to divvy up the 13 hours I put into this game into three saves. Either way, both Dead Space games seem to come up on sale pretty often, usually around $5. That is a good deal for a good game - 7 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 7/10

Suggested Price: $5