Phatose on 10/2/2013 at 06:21

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Well, up to chapter 10. Apparently I should've played on Impossible, cause normal is piss easy.

Resource scarcity is non-existent. Right now my gun takes somewhere between 3-10 shots to kill a Necromorph, or 1 headshot on a human. I currently have 1500 rounds in my inventory, and another 6000 or so in storage. About 15 medkits in storage, and enough of the gel resource to make another 10 or 12 large medkits.

Clip upgrades don't just affect how many rounds you can have before reloading, it increases how much ammo you get per pickup. Pile on a bunch of damage/clip upgrades....and you end up not needing to worry about ammo ever again.

Not that you'd have to if you didn't use those upgrades. Replay chapter keeps your current inventory, and lets you bring anything you get on your replay back with you. So if somehow you manage to run low on resources, you can just replay early chapters. Though, given the way the game buries you in ammo and medkits, it's completely unnecessary to do that.

I'm still managing to enjoy it, but this doesn't feel like Dead Space. Wore the N7 armor most of the game, because Isaac feels a lot more like a superman sci-fi hero then an engineer. He's practically a Space Marine.

catbarf on 10/2/2013 at 07:13

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I got it last night and played up through Chapter 8 on Hard. So far the resource scarcity seems to be about the same as DS2, which is to say that I'm finding more medkits than I'm using and ammo stays comfortably high. The gameplay itself seems to be more dangerous though, armor and health upgrades consume the same resources as weapon upgrades (mostly tungsten) which aren't quite as plentiful as ammo and health so it's harder to make yourself tough and I find myself getting killed by QTE attacks more often. Plus the enemies are generally more aggressive and lethal; the shuffling walk most of the humanoid enemies usually did in the previous games is all but replaced by a sprint, and large waves from multiple directions are more the norm than the exception.

There's a lot more stuff in the game. The previous door-hacking minigame is now just one of about five different minigames used to get things working again. Most of the valuable resources come from scavenger robot drops, which requires hiking around to find the optimal deployment location, then returning to a bench in ten minutes to pick them up. There are optional missions to get more resources and schematics and with a story component. The weapon system has an enormous amount of variety in what you can build. Co-op is integrated seamlessly with the campaign, it's not just having two people in the single-player but actually two different characters with dialogue, different experiences of the game (the soldier character hallucinates) and a couple of co-op only side missions.

Overall it plays very similarly to Dead Space 2, with an enormous amount of polish. The game says I'm 40% through with just under nine hours put into it, so there's definitely a lot of content here. I'd say it's worth a rental for sure, but so far I'm happy with my purchase. Definitely play on Hard though.

Fafhrd on 10/2/2013 at 19:52

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You didn't learn that from Dead Space 1 and 2?

Volitions Advocate on 11/2/2013 at 06:57

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The DLC is shit. but that hasn't changed since DS1, it's just gotten more stupid. It really is more of a microtransaction model you'd find on 90% of android games than anything I would call DLC, so I've just ignored it.

Normal difficulty sounds pretty lame. I've been playing on Zealot and I found that despite having lots of ammo and health packs, most of the health packs were small, and I think in my entire playthrough I only picked up 2 large ones. And the necros are so friggen aggressive that I was downing my meds after each fight like tums at an ancient greek vomitorium party. There were some sections as well where the benches were few and far between that I had a lot of trouble with, like the midship section on the Terra Nova with the barricaded soldier screwing up your day from the grave.

What about the ending would you have compared to the ME3 ending? Just the fact that you think it sucks? or is it something more? I found it to be alright, just the boss fight itself seemed a little bit too..... umm.... squaresoft jrpg? maybe.

Making new weapons is boss though. In the end I ended up with a sniper rifle (heavy frame, military engine, precision tip), with an underslung flamethrower, (pneumatic core, compressor) kitted out with an acid bath and a damage amplifier. It was slow to reload and had a small clip, but I could kill a Tau Volantian Necromorph with 3 shots to the chest without using stasis if I was quick enough. And one shot anywhere on the body would usually kill a unitologist. It was slow but if I ran out of ammo, my acid flamethrower would do quick work on anybody who got in close enough, the thing was a machine but it eats ammo like crazy.

Phatose on 11/2/2013 at 17:37

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In regards to the ending, sucking was the main comparison. It's not as bad as ME3, but it's still pretty far up there for ending trilogies. Spoilering everything just in case.

Sudden suicidal stupidity ahoy. Yes Isaac, they absolutely needed you on that planet to die, cause that solider dude couldn't turn a fucking rod without the "marker killer". Never mind that you weren't actually fighting a marker, you were fighting a moon. And certainly crashing the moon into yourself was the only plan, cause there are absolutely no ships in this universe capable of cracking open planetoids.

But I suppose at least that's keeping with the theme of this group being idiots. One of them froze to death because there weren't enough cold weather suits, while the "on" button for the heater was right around the fucking corner.

They never did explain why the moon wanted to eat everybody either. It's not like the damn thing starved to death without corpses to eat. It apparently had things going well enough that it could broadcast energy to markers the universe over in quantities that made humanity think it was an infinite energy source. What the hell is it's motive?


Plus, the gameplay aspects. Spend the whole game creating newer, better weapons. And they're irrelevant in the end, since you're stuck in a spot that lets your kinesis rip suckers apart. And also gives you infinite, superpowered stasis shots just so you don't have to worry about speed.


Mind you, I did in fact enjoy the game - running around shooting stuff with my doomsday gun was fun - but the plot is kind of WTF territory.

The music was good though, you're right on that. Had some notes of Alien as well as Aliens.

Once you reached the planet, did your helmet stop producing light? In the early spaceship sections, you could see the light being given off from Isaac's eye slits, but it turned off on the planet, even underground.