Isaac Clarke’s drive to survive is almost comedic, as are the endlessly violent situations he’s thrown into that would obliterate literally any other human being in the world.

When I actively changed my perspective and approached Dead Space 3 with new eyes, I was oddly enraptured by it all.

Instead, it felt like the Western equivalent to Resident Evil 6, yet another series from the era that traded in survival horror for action and suffered for it. The act of playing the game in co-op was a blast, it just wasn’t really Dead Space. Perhaps most bizarre is how Carver will randomly spawn into key cutscenes and story sequences like he has been with you the entire time, leaving many character moments and otherwise dramatic situations to feel strangely out of place. But unless you’re playing online, you’ll miss all of these, and be worse off for it. He’s the horrendously boring foil to Isaac Clarke’s unwavering mission to stop the Necromorphs and even suffers from unusual hallucinations that enhance the campaign with a few extra slices of horror. You could tackle the campaign alone or join up with a friend who took on the role of John Carver. All these years later, it’s easy to see why so many fans walked away from where EA decided to take things, and I was right there with them.ĭead Space 3 doubled down on this trajectory, while folding in a number of hot new things at the time like microtransactions and obligatory online co-op. It’s a loss of mystique, one that the original game was so skilled at preserving. Once I know the reasoning behind the aliens I’m fighting, they simply become grotesque beings waiting to be dispatched as opposed to creatures of the unknown who could be capable of anything. I don’t need the origin of the Necromorphs or the unwieldy religion behind them explained in boring moments of exposition, it isn’t necessary and only serves to drag down the pacing.

It’s still an excellent game, one ripe with high-octane set pieces and a creative approach to horror, yet it far too often relies on cliched archetypes and a predictable narrative that is far too obsessed with its own mythology. The latter two games haven’t aged as well, partly due to a greater emphasis on action and the bizarre decision to turn Isaac Clarke into a mopey spoken protagonist who struggled to stand out amidst a generation of similarly dull white male heroes.

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