Dead Space 3 first thoughts

*Please note this may contain spoilers for new players*

I recently turned 20 and with my birthday money, purchased the much anticipated Dead Space 3 by Visceral Games. I joined the Dead Space story after watching a friend play the first and then playing the second myself. I am also a self admitted achievement hunter and spent a lot of time collecting on Dead Space 2.

During the build up to the release, many things excited me in terms of new features to be added to the game. The one that attracted me the most was the addition of cooperative game-play as enjoying with a friend is always better. I was also interested to see that the Kinect would be integrated into the game with voice controls. The addition that I was most looking forward to was weapon construction, opening the possibilities for countless different combinations for different situations.

So far, I am about 40% of the way through the game and so far - am very impressed. The game-play has the same rugged survival feel of the second game and the visuals do not fail to disappoint. The enemy designs are grotesque and scary as they should be. It turns out that the enemies were inspired by images of car crash victims - which is slightly disturbing. The small details for me are the best, like how the necromorphs from the space ships differ to those found on the planet either having the standard issue suits for anti gravity or the snow suits which protect you from the cold. Its these small things that keep me going back for more no matter how many girlish screams I let out.

The story so far has left a lot to the imagination as to what has happened between Dead Space 2 and 3. First you discover that the colony on Tau Volantis has come under the influence of a marker creating another necromorph outbreak. Isaac is then contacted by soldiers sent to find him by Ellie - with obvious evidence that the two were an item after escaping the events of the Ishimura - to help destroy another marker. It is at this point you meet followers of Unitoligy, the antagonistic religious group trying to spread marker influence. It is a highly uncommon thing for there to be actual human enemies in the Dead Space series to combat which took me by surprise. The most interesting point in the story for me is when you discover the captains headquarters upon Ellie's ship covered with writing about possibly turning off ALL markers. If this is the case, we could possibly be looking at the end of the series!

The only major difference I feel that there is to the game-play is the amount of enemies you encounter. There seems to be more instances in this game where you will experience large hordes of enemies before you progress which is quite reminiscent of games like Devil May Cry. I can understand why they did this with the introduction of fully automatic and explosive weapons to deal with the hordes, but for a player like me who is a plasma cutter fan boy and sniper lover, these situations can be quite challenging - but who doesn't like a challenge?

Thanks for reading!
Thanks to www.made2game.com and pc.gamespy.com for the images