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The undead necromorphs don't have traditional anatomical weaknesses - instead, Isaac must cut off their limbs to take them down. In keeping with the last two games, Dead Space 3 is a third-person action-horror game with a specific mechanical twist. And at the center of Isaac's search lies Ellie, a fellow survivor - and more to Isaac - who led an expedition to Tau Volantis that's gone silent. Isaac is pulled from his hole to help find the origin of the Marker's powerful signal on the forgotten iceball Tau Volantis, but he's on borrowed time - the Marker-inspired religious cult of Unitology has declared Isaac a heretic condemned to death.
Dead space review series#
It's also the biggest, most ambitious game Visceral has ever made.īut Visceral's biggest accomplishment is attaining what I thought was impossible - Dead Space 3 avoids the traps of poorly implemented co-op, while capitalizing on all of its strengths.ĭead Space 3 opens with series protagonist Isaac Clarke in hiding, as he tries to forget the horrors of the Marker, an alien artifact that causes insanity and, later, an awful post-mortem mutation called necromorphism. Surprisingly, instead of watering the series down, Visceral has instead strengthened Dead Space's single-player roots with some of the strongest combat design the series has seen. If Visceral could miscalculate the basic appeal of its own series so badly, what did that mean for the rest of the game? And how could it put in the work to make a great sequel to the previous games, distracted by co-op? When it announced last year that Dead Space 3 would see the introduction of co-op to the series for the first time, it seemed like Visceral was losing sight of what made the series special - much like Dead Space 2's well-meaning but ultimately forgettable competitive multiplayer mode. Visceral has built Dead Space around a solitary, terrifying campaign experience. Dead Space 3 represents a precarious moment for developer Visceral Games.
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