If there's one thing that EA's horrific new action game Dead Space is manifestly not, it's a "shooter." Indeed, its slow pace, limited ammunition and the ever-present element of fear bring up comparisons to Resident Evil 4, but even this similarity is more a matter of pacing than anything else. What we realized during our Dead Space demonstration at this year's E3 is that one of the game's biggest draws is a heavy dose of strategy. Running in pell-mell to face down the hideous aliens is a quick ticket to some sort of gruesome dismemberment. The secret to survival in Dead Space is knowing what to shoot, where to shoot it, what to shoot it with and which of the many, many things flapping, slithering and crawling around a derelict spacecraft needs to be shot first.
The player takes the role of Isaac Clarke, a space-age repairman sent to investigate the Ishimura, a mining vessel that's stopped communicating. When he arrives he finds the ship a derelict, its crew butchered, or worse, horribly mutated into alien organisms with entirely too many teeth, too many tentacles, and no social graces whatsoever. With no weapons at all, Isaac is forced to convert many of his tools into improvised engines of destruction to try to get to the bottom of where the aliens came from and what exactly happened to the Ishimura.
The key to Isaac's (and by extension, the player's) survival is to begin to deconstruct the alien ecology that's infested the Ishimura. Everything onboard the ship, regardless of its current form, used to be a human being that was infected and mutated by the aliens and warped into some purpose-built monstrosity. It's the idea of being "purpose-built" that provides the impetus for a player's shooting strategy. We were introduced to several new creatures in our E3 demo, each of which has a definite function within the alien ecology and each of which needs to be dealt with in a different fashion.
The first creature we ran into was called a "guardian" (the dev team is dedicated to keeping the names of the creatures as simple and functional as possible). The Guardian is a stationary alien that grows from a human fused into a wall. When approached, the human belly splits open, revealing six tentacles that attach themselves to the walls, indicating that the creature is now active. What it does then is dependent upon the player's action. Coming too close to a Guardian is not recommended as it will shoot out a seventh tentacle that will instantly decapitate Isaac. Stay out of range of the tentacle and the guardian begins to spit out sub-creatures that shoot acidic spit at Isaac from range. These creatures are independent of the guardian, will survive if it dies and must be killed by having their tentacles shot off. Stepping on them merely causes them to explode. They can be killed by shooting off the tentacles that connect it to the wall.
