I can usually gauge how much I enjoyed a game not on its first play-through but how quickly I want to jump into a second. I have my handful of Fallout lives, burned through three play-throughs of Mass Effect 2 almost immediately after picking it up, I've rebought Brutal Legend after trading it in just to give it another go, and I couldn't even estimate how many times I've repeatedly gone over every level in Bayonetta at this point. I don't do this to top some leaderboard or hone skills or unlock every achievement (although the latter can often provide me with new goals and focuses). I do this because the game was fun, I actually enjoyed playing it (and I have an addictive personality) and I just want to keep playing. So with that in mind, I think it will give a clear indication of how I felt about Dead Space 2 when I finished the single player campaign today, and I was into the second chapter of a New Game+ before I could put it down. And on top of that, I had gone back to Dead Space 1 and finished my fourth play-through there about a week before picking up the sequel.
In the past few years, Dead Space was one of my favorite new IPs to pop up, somewhere between the Silent-Hill-In-Space I had originally hoped it to be and an excellent, fast-paced third-person shooter. Dead Space 2 didn't change a whole lot as far as gameplay; other than a smooth graphical upgrade, a bit of streamlining and an ever-so-slightly different button mapping I'd call the bulk of the game damn near identical. Playing the original right before this one, I slid into it fairly seamlessly, which is handy because I found I, and have heard others, died a lot in the first 5-30 seconds of the game, as it dumps you right into the action. And action is an operative word here. Where Dead Space 1 was heavier on the horror elements, isolation and atmosphere and jump-scares, 2 shifts the focus more to the action side of its spectrum. Indictitive of the shift, I noticed there seemed to be some balancing in combat. Stasis is made less powerful at slowing down the enemies, it doesn't last as long and noticeably the enemies themselves tend to be much, much faster than they had been in the past. Alternatively, the telekinesis beam is a much more powerful tool, with metal spikes and Necromorph arms in plentiful supply and the added mechanic of harpooning an enemy across a room adds both a fun and helpful alternative killing method when you find ammo in short supply. Additionally, melee now seems to actually be a viable method of taking down foes. You're able to knock back enemies if you get surrounded, and generally kick, punch and blast your way out of most altercations. The game becomes a focus on combat rather than survival.
I also found the game to be a lot more wry than it's predecessor which was a direct result of probably the most substantial change between games: Isaac Clarke himself. Originally he was a Silent Protagonist, locked in his RIG, only showing his face in the first and last minutes of the game and never saying a single word more complex than a grunt or scream. In the second game, it is substantially harder to shut him up short of letting the Necromorphs go to town on him, and spends a great deal of time taking his helmet off, including points where you kind of have to question why he'd bother and I'd swear there were even a couple of scenes where he mugged for the camera. Rather than just having characters tell him where to go and explain everything to him in detail, he is actively talking back and smarming the people telling him where to go and explaining everything to him. It's hard to say if this actively added or detracted from Clarke; he certainly had a bit more depth of character but getting to know him wasn't really an improvement, especially after growing attached to the less smartalecky, more stoic Clarke in the first game. However, it did work playing off the equally-smartalecky Ellie after she shows up in the latter half of the game.
I've heard a lot of praise for the story, although I'm not sure where it's coming from. I found it at least fairly standard, and the psychological elements were fun, leaving you sure that Isaac is insane but never sure exactly HOW insane he's become. It picks up three years after the events of the first game but for all intents and purposes you're coming in exactly where it had left off. With the majority of the world-building out of the way already it's a pretty standard fare, and dropping you right in the action it's probably not hard to pick up what's going on even if you haven't played the first game. And while the Marker and Unitology stuff probably makes less sense if you haven't been through it all already, even if you have it still probably doesn't leave you making all that much more sense in the end.
The other major change-up from the first game, and this one certainly an improvement, is the revamp to the Zero-G sections. While there was really nothing particularly wrong with the first game's handling of it, the old gameplay was completely scrapped and replaced with a flying mechanic that I THINK is akin to the jetpack-flying in Dark Void, which I never actually played but from I know of it I believe it was similar. It crops up every now and then and it's very fun to zip around and solve puzzles or avoid deathtraps as warranted, and the only problem I could find with it is the infrequency of the sections. At least, when they do pop up, most of them are short and over with quickly, and I could have gone for some longer segments utilizing the flying rather than just floating around, grabbing a power source, plugging it in, etc.
This leads in to the only complaint I really have about the game, is that it could have stood to shake things up a little. Aside from Zero-G and some steering-falling segments, it's pretty much all running-and-gunning and simple puzzle-solving through the 15 chapters. There's some variety in the foes you'll face, ranging from the swarms of childform-Necromorphs, the standard-issue Necromorph sieges you must hold off and the admittedly fun but quickly repetitive Stalker sections, in which galloping creatures ostensibly resembling malformed pachycephalosaurs (and sounding like Jurassic Park velociraptors to the point that getting through the first section of them unlocks a Clever Girl achievement) hop and hide around a maze of obstacles (typically large shipping crates) until they get a chance to charge at you, and briefly the game becomes more about strategy and timing than straight gunplay. The Brutes are back with a couple of other larger Necromorphs creating a few miniboss segments but the very concept of the miniboss implies there is a larger, grander boss fight which this game never really delivers. Even the final boss fight is primarily just another swarm you had to fend off. Alternatively, the first game had two massive boss fights, the Leviathan and the Hivemind, and even to a lesser extent the asteroid field and the Slug boss segments. The Leviathan remains one of my favorite boss fights of all time, an action set that was a masterpiece of lighting and design and just fun gameplay that I could write a lot more about than I probably should here, maybe some other time. Even the Hivemind was a wonderful Final Boss fight, transplanted into a modern game from a begone era, a giant monster with a repeating moveset to learn and glowing weak-points to shoot. It was the kind of boss fight I'm happy to build up to, to have as a cap on the game. It's not enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game, but the lack of variety really stood out to me. That could even be part of why I dived immediately into the second play-through, there was no break in the gameplay that particularly sated me, but I was happy to just keep rolling. And I'll gladly roll into the inevitable third* game in the series when that crops up, too, no matter how much or how little has changed.
I haven't said anything about the multiplayer because I have no interest in playing the multiplayer. Maybe if some friends are playing I'll hop on with them, but otherwise it's fairly useless to me.
Dead Space 2, developed by Visceral Games and published by EA Games. Images taken from Dead Space 2's official site.
*Accurately, it'd be, what, the fifth game? Plus two movies and a comic. This thing built up a sizable franchise quick.
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