Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dead Space 2 Presents How Not to Make a Sequel!

There are many problems with Dead Space 2, some of which I’ve already touched on. But one of the things Dead Space 2 does, possibly better than any other game out there, is illustrate how not to make a sequel.

The first Dead Space was already a painfully derivative game. Its writing was atrocious, its story laughable. Its game play took a model fleshed fully in System Shock 2 and flipped it into third person and dumbed it down, made it so repetitive that the game was fun, but only in a mechanical manufactured way. It was a game for profit, not for love, and its true colors showed through and through. Dead Space’s competence was its only success, its homages its only saving grace.

Dead Space 2 was far worse. It took all of the elements that made Dead Space unpleasant and distilled them, tuning up the gore, the dumb plot, the bad writing. It added a vast cast of characters we never get a chance to know, a loosely telegraphed betrayal and some absolute nonsense plot twists in there for good measure, just to make sure no one would ever be taking the Dead Space IP seriously again in the future. Its only success as a game was its final tongue in cheek beat, the quiet that Isaac takes pleasure in and the lack of a monster in the closet scare that the original Dead Space ended on. Aside from that one grace note the nicest thing I can say about Dead Space 2 is that it’s a fairly playable example of how not to make a video game sequel.

Every single element of its mechanics can be broken down and upheld as a thing that should not be done in gaming. Its grisly tutorial opening, while functional, for example, forces players to rush through early stages of the game, assumes familiarity and concern with the characters involved and immediately places characters who may not even know how to walk in a do-or-die situation where they’re being chased by monsters and having their resources stripped away from them. The initial character design, far from being interesting or functional, is mostly just annoying, with the player wrapped in a shoddy blue straight jacket which he is eventually freed from by a mentally ill scientist with an apparent heart of gold. Compare this to the first Dead Space’s competent, effective opening, where we learn about the world as a literal explorer who is entering an eerily empty spacecraft and wandering around it, getting to know the landscape himself as we come to understand the mechanics which guide his traversal of that landscape. When the threat finally does emerge in Dead Space it is not only made abundantly clear beforehand just what your enemies do and how you need to fight them. Dead Space 2 learned nothing from the polished, intelligent introduction that Dead Space afforded its players. Instead it went with a philosophy of “bigger is better” which seemed to embolden nearly every aspect of the game.

Except perhaps the one place that could have benefited from some creativity and scale and scope growth: the weaponry. A handful of new weapons which the player is never really asked to use do not an interesting set of new mechanics make. Aside from the Seeker Rifle, which was actually kind of useless in most situations, I never saw fit to even try any of the new fangled toys, with their javelins or mines or rivets, that the game wanted to throw my way. Instead there’s a broad expansion of the necessity of stasis powers and the ability to use kinetic objects as weapons (pro-tip developers who want to use physics based combat systems – Half Life 2 already did it better than you) which color most of the early and late missions in the game, and have fuckall to do with play in the middle.

And gone are the ominous hordes that made up the majority of the first Dead Space’s enemies. Or perhaps gone isn’t the right term. Overshadowed is better. These critters are often replaced by black versions of themselves which are, for whatever reason, tougher but in no other way functionally different from their Dead Space counterparts. But they’re not randomly spawning in any significant way any more, and you’ll find yourself frequently battling mini-boss monsters who appear to be made of giant beasts of burden whose corpses were infected by the whatever-virus. The simplicity of the first game, wherein your enemies were all derived from the Ishimura’s denizens and exceptions to that rule all warranted explanation in game, is completely stripped away in favor of providing the player with a handful of action set pieces that demand specific application of guns and powers at certain times. The end result is a certain type of unexplained boss emerging in a certain type of arena to provide the player with a certain kind of fight.

The inclusion of unexpected enemies in Dead Space, enemies that broke the mold of arena-explore-arena, is something that Dead Space 2 sorely lacks. And with its loss part of what made Dead Space fun to play is gone as well. This is to say nothing of just how easy the game is compared to its predecessor, or its increased gore level which was literally sold as an attempt to upset younger player’s mothers (Here’s a protip, developers: I’m twenty six. I’ve got plenty of shit in my life to make my mom upset, and the fact that you force me to stomp on people’s chests to get items isn’t going to make the list. The fact that you fucked up an IP so derived from Aliens so thoroughly might though.). There’s an overwhelming cadre of qualities that Dead Space 2 should’ve learned from its predecessor but instead simply attempted to Hollywood up elements that EA’s marketing department found most marketable.

I shudder to think of what Mirror Edge 2, EA’s other moderately successful original IP from 2008, would’ve looked like under the steady hand of EA’s marketing department. Given how middling that game was to start I can’t imagine it would’ve been particularly fetching if this is the direction they’re taking their games in. But I do appreciate just how naked all of the plays in Dead Space 2 are, how important it seems to be to its developers that it not only sells copies, but that it sells a lot of copies to a lot of people. And I appreciate that EA has published a game that shows us, beat for beat, what not to do in a sequel. Take notes, developers. Please.