Dead Space 2

Dead Space 2 Trailer

Game Overview
You begin play as Engineer Issac Clarke upon an alien infested spaceship, where you fight your way to survival or become just like the others. Throughout this third-person shooter survival-horror thriller, Clarke is haunted by flashbacks from government testing, as well as his deceased girlfriend, all while fighting a deadly case of dementia. The use of brute melee force, and advanced weapons such as plasma cutters and kenesis are key to your survival.

Single-player mode
You begin waking up in a straight jacket, having to run away from an onslaught of Necromorphs. A few minutes later you find the only remaining survivor, who cuts you out of the jacket only to follow-up by killing himself after apologizing for what they have done to you.

After learning your hand-to-hand combat skills, you learn the power of Kinesis, or the ability to pick up loose objects and use them as weapons. Kinesis helps you off a few monsters on the way to finding an escape route out of the hospital that has been your home while being a test subject.

Issac soon finds his way upon plasma energy ammo, which means you soon get your first weapon,  the Plasma Cutter. On different difficulty levels, which you have four levels to choose from, ammo is in abundance or is scarce. In my case, I played on Normal mode and ammo is available enough to free fire for execution purposes. As you explore the facilities, you find your way upon ammo, cash and power nodes to upgrade your weapons strength. Usually there is a save station after each checkpoint and a store every so often to purchase new weapons, medi-packs, or hi-tech engineer suits, which really boosts your level of interest once you get your first suit.

This mode of play is very deep and intricate. I was impressed with the surprise element of appearance of Necromorphs, and bosses throughout the initial stages. I'm excited to see what's next.

Online Gameplay
Now, with using GameFly certain games require codes to access online features. Usually you have to buy the code if you are the second owner of the game. Fortunately for me, there is a trial period to access the online gameplay.

The interesting thing about playing this mode is you can either play as a Necromorph or as an Engineer. It takes quite some time to understand the controls of being a Necromorph. You can choose from four different ones, each with different attack methods. As for being an engineer, well if you played the single-player mode, you'll know what to do.

To be honest, online gameplay is a knock-em' down shoot-around frantic gameplay mode to where you just run and kill. There is not a whole lot of strategy involved when playing. I do not necessarily like online gameplay, I got bored with it pretty quickly.

Here is a video from YouTube with online play.

Final Verdict
Dead Space 2 has its strong points and its weak points. The single-player mode is awesome, being very detailed with a good story line. Unfortunately, the online gameplay mode is lacking in terms of variety of modes to play. The character selection is a plus but, not enough to draw me to invite my friends to play online. Even that being said, Dead Space 2 in my opinion is very valuable and is worth the price of play. Buy this game and add it to your collection. You will not be disappointed.