Welcome to the latest HCG feature to rock your socks off: HCG Versus Mode. Two opinions! Two arguments! Who will walk away the winner? Only you can decide. To start things off, Adam and Sean discuss why Dead Space is (or is not) a good game. There will almost certainly be spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t played the game yet, you’d do well to steer clear.

Dead Space is not a good horror game. It’s not a good shooter. It’s not a well told horror tale either. Sure, it has pretty graphics. The sound design is top notch. The voice acting is pretty decent. Other than that, Dead Space fails pretty hard.

It starts off promising, if predictably. The USG Ishimura has gone silent while mining a planet. You and your team are sent to investigate. Things go horribly wrong. Your shuttle is destroyed, nightmarish creatures appear, people die. It’s up to you and the remaining survivors to figure out how to escape, and the first step is to get the trains working. Only you can fix them.

It’s a standard video game fetch quest. Go here. Do this. Come back. The problem is that these are the kinds of things you do for the entirety of the game. Find widget A, come back, place it into socket B, et cetera and so forth. While you slowly unravel the mystery of what happened to the Ishimura, it’s nothing that hasn’t already been done in a thousand horror/sci-fi movies already. An unspeakable evil has been unleashed. Some people are helping it. Everyone else is being slaughtered. The ones helping it are stark raving mad.

The developers made a big deal about “strategic dismemberment” in the game, where you have to shoot the limbs off the various monsters in order to kill them. The novelty wears off quickly though. Enemies do nothing but rush directly at you, giving you plenty of time to slice them to ribbons long before they reach you. This is how the original Doom‘s enemies acted. The same few types repeat throughout the game, the only difference being that they’re stronger and take more damage later on.

As for the horror elements, it resorts to putting you in the dark for the majority of the game and trying to make you jump with cheap scares. If you’re scared of the dark I guess this is pretty terrifying, but I personally outgrew that a long time ago. The game tries to add a bit of psychological horror with the introduction of the main character’s wife randomly appearing a few times, but it happens so rarely that I tended to forget about it before long. And, big surprise, it turns out she was dead all along! Gee, didn’t see that one coming guys!

So what did I like? Well, like I said before, the visuals and sound are excellent. The way they integrated the menu system into the game world was pretty neat. The only time you’re out of the game world is when you start or quit the game. The boss fights had a nice old school feel to them. But for everything else? Dead Space is a pretty looking, dull, predictable shooter without much of a soul. — Sean

Dead Space is a game that’s about the little things. Sure, its story isn’t terribly original. An industrial ship full of ravenous monsters—hmmmmm, I believe I’ve seen that before (and many times at that). And of course there are many similar over-the-shoulder 3rd-person shooters. But Dead Space plays with these elements in a way that works better than any game featuring said elements. Like I said, the success is in the minutiae.

Take for example the HUD—or lack thereof, as is the case in Dead Space. Rather than a life bar hanging ominously over protagonist Isaac Clarke, or an ammo meter chilling to his side, players get all of the information they need on Isaac’s suit and weapons. Want to know how many bolts you’ve got left in the plasma cutter? Check the gun’s LED display. Wondering how much longer you’ll make it against the hordes of dangerous creatures? Just look at the vial-like health meter on Issac’s back. Even the game’s cutscenes are shown through Isaac, via status updates viewed through Isaac’s visor. No game before worked in so simple and effective a HUD as Dead Space, but I suspect we’ll see plenty of imitations in the future.

Now, about those scares: no, Dead Space isn’t very scary. See, there’s scary—things that go “boo!” in an attempt to frighten you, which doesn’t work on me anymore—and there’s creepy—sights, sounds, and a general atmosphere designed to get under your skin. Dead Space has plenty of the latter, and I loved every minute of it. This is a game you need to play with a nice HDTV and a great surround sound setup or you’ll lose a lot of atmosphere. Every little creak, snap, growl, moan, cry, whisper…they all slowly work at your nerves, inching coldly down your spine, daring you to put down your controller and walk away.

Sean’s right: the jump scares get old quick. But those are red herrings, meaningless trifles, thrown in as a bonus for extremely skittish players. The heart of the horror in Dead Space lies in the aforementioned atmosphere, which is dripping from every corner of the TV screen and oozing out of the speakers. If the flickering lights, seemingly endless dark, and haunting whispers don’t unnerve you by the end, you’re probably a sociopath. I’d check into a clinic if that’s the case. I’ll admit to bias in this area as I am quite the horror nut.

I’m not however a big fan of shooters these days (due largely to their over-saturation of the market), but Dead Space hooked me regardless. Figuring out the best weapon for every situation; searching for the weakest point on a Necromorph; all while struggling not to lose your cool in the heat of battle. That, dear readers, is what I live for in the shooters I play, and Dead Space deals it out in spades. I also love upgrading characters and equipment, an addiction Dead Space caters to with panache. Players can upgrade their suit for better protection, buy new weapons, and increase the usefulness of their current weapons. Not exactly a ground-breaking idea, but it works, and works very well at that.

I could wax ecstatic for days about how great Dead Space is, but suffice it to say that Dead Space is a great atmospheric-horror/action/shooter game that takes many familiar gaming elements and ups the ante on each one. The sights and sounds are beautiful but creepy; the shooting is tight, accurate, and fun; the exploration never grows old (take that buddy o’ mine); and the enemies get tougher but never too difficult. And might I add that Dead Space offers one of the largest, craziest, nastiest final bosses in the history of gaming? I think I just did.

So if for some reason you’re still on the fence about Dead Space, read over mine and Sean’s opinions carefully and decide what rings truest to you. After all, everything you read are just that: opinions. Neither of us are saying definitively that one is right and the other is wrong. If you don’t like horror and/or are sick to death of shooters, perhaps you should avoid Dead Space. If either of those things intrigue you, renting Dead Space won’t hurt. — Adam