'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.

damn near a perfect game - I think the pacing in episode 3 lets the narrative down a little bit and the objects straight up suck to fight (the bridge of ep6 is absolute hell) and I guess you could argue the shooting mechanics leave a bit to desire but I really don't care when your story - specifically the delivery of it - is this good. the way this plays around with concepts of fiction integrating itself into reality is so endlessly fasincating and the way the DLC expands on it is nothing short of mind blowing; the main game here is good, really good in fact, but it's the two DLC chapters (the best parts of the game) that really take the concepts of the game to their creative extremes. also the DLC is just a technical marvel - have no clue how they pulled off that maze on the 360 lol. excited to move onto American Nightmare and Control !!

Nearly a flawless survival horror, aside from some annoying puzzles and inconsistent, brutal difficulty spikes (namely near the end of Night 2). The atmosphere here is one of the best I've ever experienced; Himuro Mansion is imbued with such a palpable sense of dread in every creak and crevice of the map, and the use of the found footage aesthetic during the flashback FMV's are geniunely unsettling. I also think the combat is pretty fun for the most part; maybe a little bit repetitive by the end and a bit clunky but I think the core loop here is a lot of fun!

In short, it's a near perfect horror game that never outstays it's welcome - very excited to play the rest of this franchise.

not without it's flaws; took me a second to adjust to the fact that this is primarily a cover shooter more then anything, the weapon upgrade system is kind of abysmal and I still don't know how I feel about the melee system (I appreciate it in theory but idk if it ever fully clicked for me) but man this is a fucking blast lol; usually cover shooters annoy the shit out of me but I think the movement system here makes it a lot more dynamic then it'd be otherwise; giggled a lot when I realised that the cover in the final boss fight rotated around the arena. don't really have much to say here, it's a great game! credits sequence is rlly cute lol

Basically a perfect horror game; such a laser-focused experience that didn't let up once in my entire playthrough - I don't really get scared by much any more but this routinely made me shit myself in a way I haven't experienced since I played Alien Isolation as a kid back in 2015. It's kind of a miracle that this balances itself as well as it does - each of the mechanics introduced in this walk a perfect tightrope of being intentionally arduous and stressful without crossing over into annoying territory and it brings a certain weight to literally every action you take; each time I shut a door too loudly I think my soul left my body. Speaking of scares; I love how almost every scare I experienced in this game (besides like, 3?) are all unscripted moments - I think it's so fucking cool that I didn't even get a glimpse of the monster, feeling him as a all encompassing presence until the prison section, where I spotted him lurking in the dark. It's one of the most genuinely frightening moments I've experienced in recent memory and it's insane to think that it was born completely organically.

don't even know what else to say about this thing, it's perfect! Adored this so much, excited to go back and play it more soon.

I can't imagine what 'Armored Core 2' would be like for someone who skipped the expansions to the first game, but speaking as someone who didn't, this is about as standard as sequels come. If we are to assess this game without the 1997 and 1999 instalments in mind, it's a fantastic and thrilling breakthrough, but if this is not the case then it is merely a more polished more of 1999s 'Master of Arena'. Lucky it is, then, that I found FromSoftware's exit piece for the Playstation so moreish, because I felt no more provoked by this game than I have any of the previous, which is maybe why I sound so down on it in the introduction, so let us lighten up a little.

'Armored Core 2' has just as well a compellingly pulpy set up as any other entry, a mission to Mars! The new human solution to the industrial consequences which trapped all underground previously is a new colony setup on the red planet. Lax on regulation as an emerging setup is to be, this is where the Ravens come back into the picture, working on the corp offering the carrots each passing hour—you, no different in structural entrapment to any other forcefully integrated into the economic cesspit, a hopeless vulture with no agency. The brutal, nihilistic corvid. What proceeds is, in terms of levels, an almost remake of the first generation games, with many sections operating as straight up remastering down to the cutscenes, moving, say, the desert train mission of 'Armored Core'—where planes crudely nipped at you from angels that jank had refused elegance—to a personal favourite. But such good spirits had the understated tingle of a game running out of ideas, which is the real shame, for half of the levels in 'Armored Core 2' are far in away the best the series could offer by the turn of the millennium, but the other half are simply half hearted or seen before too recently. Mechanically, the game is stronger than it has ever been, with overheating adding a new layer to the carefully formed tapestry of AC building first weaved in those focused Playstation titles, the addition is just as considered, but so little of it's company is. Customisation has more here than ever, and yet, the game never challenged enough nor felt long enough to warrant such investigation on anything that hadn't been present in the prior generation anyway. A waste of good metal, since the effort here might be the strongest innovation setting this sequel apart from what came before.

On difficulty, as was perhaps illuminated earlier, '2' is a strange mecha duck. Still challenging yes, but also quite easy up until the abrupt shift in the second half which felt like the game coming back up to speed with the adversity felt in 'Master of Arena'. Now, here's a funny thought, have I really gotten that much better at 'Armored Core' between 'Project Phantasma' and '2', or is my almost immediate abandonment of tetrapods going into the first hour of this sequel and sharp dedication to a light sniping mech with little resistance or major effort from me compared to the last entries all the way through to the end maybe a sign that the balancing in this one wasn't amazing? This adversity I sought had nested itself very comfortably in the Arena mode of course, for what was an excellent but truly brutal experience. Of course it, like 'Phantasma' before it is loaded with small potatoes, quite literally small in the case of the child you murder in the first 10 placements, but when you get stuck on an Arena fight in the top half of the list it can be a real fabric chewer.

Now, while the missions of the game didn't take nearly as much focus as the previous, '2' still has a fair few pretty thrilling moments. So as Mars develops, authority makes itself known. The Frighteners work as an effectively intimating force ludically at first, with the Fortner's handing you off a guaranteed failure on a sortie and later an excellent 2 on 1 fight, but Klein, while loaded with some very daunt dialogue that does him a lot of favours, is a complete pushover. The final encounter itself is great for sure, with his final design being something truly otherworldly, but he stands no chance and could've definitely been a more gritty challenge, no matter how appreciable his noble end is.

With the end of the independent attempts at controlling Mars, whether they be some earnest attempt to end the libertarian dystopia or some grotesque market warfare, the red planet bleeds and it was all upon your hand as a Raven. Klein asks a sly question in "what is it that you wish for?", as the brutality of the status quo came back again and again to those who systematically helped enforce it. Victims too are the Ravens when it comes to the making of fate, the fence-guard of capital and its inherent material and psychological nature leaves them, cruelly, unable to wish. The bird flees change not because of anything genuine enough to be called visceral or cerebral, it flees because it does not know anything else.

'Master of Arena' made me feel a little silly for most of what I said about 'Project Phantasma', as I realise now there was little actual innovation I needed to find the mechanics and systems of the first generation 'Armored Core' engaging again. Instead, 'Master of Arena' boasts better pacing, mission quality and another simple but still compelling narrative dressing to make this easily the best of FromSoftware's output on the original Playstation.

Of the titular notion, the Arena mode in this game has become more eloquently entwined with the selection of missions rather than feeling like an odd side gig. I never resented that feeling but I wouldn't have ever guessed how much I'd appreciate a more directed and paced inclusion as we see here, motivation to do it felt far less intrinsic as it did in 'Project Phantasma', who's generous economy made it more a training ground than a side hustle. 'Master of Arena', eager to maintain an approachable figure to those not loading a memory card, solves this with it's more visionary integration, making the game more enticing to play for long stretches as well as keeping the designers from having to do much more number crunching.

The aforementioned missions the Arena dances with in 'Armored Core: Master of Arena' are of course, just like the previous expansion, well learned of the lessons of the previous, and thus are a small array of Generation 1's finest. There was only one which I found frustrating or overlong, and that was in a good way, which shall be talked about soon, but first is credit to be given to the presentational qualities of these maps. These Playstation titles have never had poor soundtracks by any means, but I heard a noticeable increase in the quality of the techno I was hearing here than the other entries, and while levels don't look drastically better than anything in 'Phantasma', there's far less forgettable blurs of small yet sparse areas found in the first entry, and the environments of most levels has something worth noting about it, be it some quirk of design or just a very sound atmosphere.

Attention must be given to the final act of this game which, good god above, has maybe one of the hardest things this studio has put to disc. At least you could skip Nine-Ball in the debut game, but this time there was no running away from what is maybe one of the hardest boss fights I've done in a good while. The Nine-Balls[s] and Seraph are an utterly grueling prototype of the FromSoftware endurance fight and they were the singular frustrating and overlong part of this game, but to be perfectly honest, it is—to put it academically—metal as fuck. Packed in with a neat twist reveal to spice up what has been a simple tale of revenge to a backdrop of the same, unmoved hyper-capitalist dystopia all the entries have been in at this point, the dialogue and voice acting are genuinely really awesome building up to the wild fight itself.

So that's Generation 1 wrapped up for me, not bad. This is the only entry I feel much interest in maybe returning to one day and that's definitely worth something. That was a lot of fun, hopefully Nine-Ball stays down for now, that would be nice.