The Twister gameplay is fine for what it is, but the plot is straight up god-awful. This is a game written by someone that thinks true-crime dramas are deep and profound just because people cry and suffer a lot, not because of conveying an actual message and developing any themes. This game seems to exist just to delight on other people's suffering. Beyond the "four people need to catch a serial killer" premise it doesn't do anything interesting or even good. The female character in particular has various scenes that are borderline sexist, which I fear is a recurrent theme on David Cage games.

A game that has nothing to say that seems to put its characters in increasingly horrible situations just to show off more human misery, and does it in a way that feels just uncomfortable. And, to top it off, it's delivered with such a bad taste that it becomes gross (or ridiculous, depending on how you look at it).

Grand Theft Auto V's map is big and highly detailed. The sky is really beautiful and the world is gorgeous. When playing, I could feel how massive the game is, it always felt like there was always something to do or a new place to go to, I still feel like I haven't even seen the full map yet. These feelings are something only a company with no hesitation to crunch the dev team like Rockstar could achieve, but the façade falls off when you try to look into what the world really has to offer. The open-world is split in three:

-Driving around and murdering people

-Side missions and activities

-Scripted events

This is what's there to do in Los Santos and the surrounding areas. Driving around and running over people is fun when it's the mean to an end, the end usually being starting a mission or going to some place. If your whole purpose is to recklessly drive around town you'll get bored in a few minutes as the driving is “realistic”, although it's not actually realistic driving. Cars don't crash in real life as they do here, realism is the excuse they give for having cumbersome driving. Look, no matter how hard the guys over at Rockstar try, a true realistic driving simulation simply does not work when realistic driving is not the core of the experience, and it definitely isn't for a GTA game. After all, Auto is just ⅓ of Grand Theft Auto. The other stuff is minor content which might lead to some interesting or even funny situations, but just exist to have the world bloated with side missions that feel like filler episodes of a larger TV show and side activities that feel like they don't belong here. I mean, when someone says the words Grand Theft Auto, tennis and golf aren't the things that come to mind, right?

The scripted events usually happen while driving somewhere in the middle of the way so it's up to you if you want to go over and get yourself into whatever is going on, which most likely is someone getting robbed or in some cases you might get a unique event depending on the character you're playing as. I remember driving around the north coast and finding a couple of guys who were pulling a Goodfellas on the daughter of some mafia boss who later paid me some great cash for saving her. I wouldn't mind playing this game again some time in the future just to see what new stuff I can find, but as I've been saying, apart from small situations like these, I don't think there's really much else that is rewarding enough.

The world is empty, is what I'm trying to get to. Quite pretty and impressive when looked from afar, but empty when looked closely. The city serves the one and only purpose of giving context to the main story, and everything else is a distraction to make the player feel like the game is huge when in reality there's not much to it. One thing I'll give it is that, even if it's not something meaningful in the long run, navigating its architecture is quite good, maybe even just a little bit fun. Running away from the cops on rooftops, driving a bike downhill in Mountain Chiliad and parachuting from above the clouds to fall on the pool of a mansion are just examples of what can be done with such freedom of movement. I really like doing this sort of stuff, getting lost in the world and messing around is pretty fun. The world is big and there's like a shit ton of mechanics for the player to express itself, even more on the online, so it's easy to understand why a game like this has so many online roleplaying servers.

Still, all of this is just a mere distraction from the main content, and I found more enjoyment in doing all of this with a friend on a private online game. But enough talk already, let's talk about more interesting stuff.

The side content, the open-world and the main story aren't that disconnected at all. All three are about doing whatever you want without giving a fuck about anything. Grand Theft Auto V pictures a world where everyone is an egotistical douchebag who only looks after themselves and life and death are treated like they hold no meaning. Early in the game there's a mission where you torture someone and potentially ruin their life, only to later turn out this wasn't the right guy, and nobody gives a crap about this whole situation. This thing that I just described is basically the whole game. You can watch someone get crushed into pieces in an airplane turbine and all Michael has to say is “whoops”. I've read around people say GTA V is sexist, in that every woman is portrayed as a disgusting and pathetic person, but this isn't exclusive to women as every person you ever meet in this game is either that, a crazy psycho, a selfish idiot or anything in-between.

Out of the main trio, Michael is the real main character of the game I'd say, as he's the only one who has any kind of actual development. Franklin is a dude who has no direction and has no greater goals in mind, who exists to help the other two in whatever they're doing, and whatever Franklin achieves is by pure chance. A bit later after starting the game he's gifted a mansion from Hollywood Hills for whatever reason. Trevor is a guy whose only personality trait is that he's bat-shit insane. That's it. The game disguises its poorly-written characters under minutes-long conversations while driving to make them look like they have more going on and, more specifically, to make them look cool. GTA V wants to look cool. Why is there a mission where you assault an actor to take their costume and steal a 007-esque car from a movie set? Because it looks cool. Why does Trevor torture some random worker in the most horrible way possible? Because it looks cool. Why does Michael beats the fuck out of the contract negotiator of an underpaid actor and threatens the same actor? Because it looks cool. It wants to make the player feel like they're cool. This is the most straight-out-of-2013 game made, probably ever.

GTA V believes the world is full of freaks and has no salvation, so all you can do is have fun while the world is rotting all around you. Nobody has good intentions because why would anyone even care about anything in this God-forsaken world? GTA V is the embodiment in videogame form of THIS image. The writing is childish, it feels like it was written by a group of depressed teenagers who skimmed over the Wikipedia articles about nihilism and cynicism. But you guys wanna know what GTA V is actually about? Grand Theft Auto V is about finding meaning to your life. This is the level we're at. And of course the characters find the meaning to their lives in crime. Heists and murder more specifically. I always believed GTA, since San Andreas, treated the criminal life as something that is never good to aspire to and that these games weren't just a glorification of crime as a way of life. Although I'll admit my favourite GTA is Vice City, a game that thinks Scarface is just cool looking mafia guy Antonio Fontono gets da big money. In Vice City, Tommy Vercetti wants to rise to the top, no matter how many people he needs to take out in the way, with not many moral conflicts and little to no hesitation to pull the trigger.

But Grand Theft Auto V on the other hand has Michael conflicted on if he should leave this life of crime and start taking care of his family while he does a lot of missions where they kill an absurd amount of cops, private military forces and street thugs just for money or whatever selfish reasons. A moral conflict as deep as a puddle. Later on in the game he gets the opportunity to be a movie producer, something he's really enthusiastic about since he keeps saying he's “a movie guy”, but still doesn't give up on robbing the biggest bank in L.A. And by the way, now that I mention heists and movies, GTA V is an homage to heist films. In a way it's a really, really dumbed down reinterpretation of Heat. And I mean that literally, they even straight up recreate Heat’s first robbery in one mission. It's similar to Vice City in that they both are inspired by crime movies in premise but not in spirit. Scarface and Heat end with a message about how criminal life is never a good thing, but VC and GTA V have the exact opposite message. However, GTA V differs from VC in that it tries to give Michael, the only character with something resembling an arc, some sort of moral conflict about his family, although he doesn't care or think about how the things he does affect his family, he doesn't really care about anyone, he just says everything’s going to be okay and go on with the mass murders. This conflict is ultimately pointless.

After losing his family and later having them come back, after being at the verge of death more than twice, after almost getting his family killed, all he does is putting the bad guy inside of a car trunk and throwing the car off a cliff to blow it up. If problems come to you, all you have to do is to kill the problems, no need to try and be a better person. Extra points if it looks cool when you do it. The game ends and nobody has learned a single lesson from all this.

one of my friends said "this game is too eager" while playing it recently, and i think that's the game's biggest fault - it has great atmosphere (at least at first, as the game goes on it gets samey) and the creature designs are suitably scary, but the game never lets you bask in the atmosphere too long, terrified of boring the player and instead opting to introduce enemies every time there's an opportunity for downtime. this still can work, and maybe it does; the problem is that the game is also too easy. on medium, i always had enough cash for whatever i wanted. i never had to make hard choices selling items or using my last healing item or even running out of items. i had over 20 medium health packs by the end of my playthrough. perhaps this issue is alleviated on hard, but i'm not exactly eager to hop back into the dreary hallways of the ishimura anytime soon.

besides the lacking difficulty and environmental variety, the story is also a letdown. it doesn't really say anything of value, nor does it really feel like you're making any tantamount progress until you're at the end of the game, just running around in circles, doing busyboy errands for people through your phone. i'd be amiss to mention the wonderful, completely in-universe UI, but that's about the only thing i found truly memorable about this game, i'm sad to say. if you're gonna do alien, at least try and have the same amount of environmental variety as alien!

'Dead Space' is an OK game that could be really great. There's very little about it that is actively offensive, the game is fun, looks good, and has enough unqiue ideas of it's own to be interesting for the runtime, but it feels a little forgettable due to how poorly it attempts to grasp an effective horror direction.

Presentation is where the game shines the most, textures, shadows and reflections still look great even if they lack the variety of, say, 'Mirror's Edge'. Designs all around are great, all the architecture has an almost 'space brutalist' quality to it, and all the tools as well as armour are very unique. The diagetic GUI is easily the best work here, it's clever and immersive, a truly natural evolution of the semi-transparent GUIs found in older horror games like 'System Shock 2'.

Speaking of, 'Dead Space' was supposedly intended earlier in conception as a sequel to 'Shock 2', until the developers saw Capcom's 'Resident Evil 4' and decided to make something similar, but in space. Now having finished the game, I'm pretty reinforced that this wasn't a great idea. 'Dead Space' is grotesque, violent and horrifying—much like Capcom's campy shooter—but isn't scary, which is a problem given just how seriously the game takes itself. 'Resident Evil 4' worked because it was self-aware and silly, when you have a game playing the relentless pace and excessive gore straight with the intention to scare it doesn't come across so great. Visceral Games amazing A/V work would make for a great atmosphere but it never gets the opportunity to breathe. There's no building tension or sense of pacing, it's all just endless limbs flying and screaming which eventually gets more numbing than unnerving, this coming from a person who is is normally really easily shocked with gore. It's not about how horrific your imagery is, but how you frame it, and the action oriented approach with tight controls makes 'Dead Space' play more like 'Doom' than 'Silent Hill'. This isn't to say the game is bad, it's just shallower and more boring than it could have been with some slower pacing, and this is probably why so much of it just seems to be white noise for my memory.

So while 'Dead Space' is a terrible horror game, as a shooter, it's pretty good! The physics and slow-motion mechanics are givens but the zero-gravity is really different and used in some super creative ways. The set pieces don't distrupt the core gameplay loop, actually enforcing core lessons from the design, and it's really nice to be have precision shooting demanded on humanoid body parts that aren't the head. The necromorphs are really fun to fight, but you really must play on hard mode. I played on it while only using the starting plasma cutter and it was still too easy to feel truly tense, so I can't imagine how it feels on the easier modes.

Narratively, the game is mostly compelling, but the characters are really aggressive and antagonistic to each other, and at times it's just beyond sensibility which can make them pretty frustraiting. The plot has some good enough intrigue to make the macguffin chase it turns into feel more consequential, but it's really let down by the protagonist. Isaac Clarke might have a name which assures us Visceral Games have good taste in literature but his motivations are basically void and his relationship with Nicole is hard to get invested in given how shallow and generic they both are.

I've heard people compare this series to Ridley Scott's film 'Alien', and having now played it's first entry I'm completely baffled. I'm starting to think people who make this comparison haven't actually seen the movie, because 'Alien' was all about stillness and subtlety, qualities which 'Dead Space' hardly possess! This doesn't make it bad, though! 'Dead Space' is a lot of fun and has great presentation, but it really did have more potential and I was pretty sad that it never reached the level of still tension that people said it would. For all these flaws—and the terrible PC port, please use a controller if you wanna play this lol—there's a lot worth seeing here, even if it could have been better.