First Appearance Dead Space 2 PC Games

Anyone remotely versed in the survival horror genre knows that the element of surprise is critical in this type of game. And as great as the original Dead Space was at maintaining a sense of grim uncertainty about what was lying in wait around the next corner, its greatest feat might have been proving that EA was capable of succeeding with an original title right out of the gate. That leaves developer Visceral Games (formerly known as EA Redwood Shores) in an interesting position leading up to the release of the sequel. How does the team crafting the next atmospheric trek through the zombie-infested corners of outer space top the out-of-left-field success it achieved the first time around? By not falling into the trap of making the same game.

Executive producer Steve Papoutsis was in the GameSpot office a few weeks ago to demo two brief areas from Visceral's upcoming sequel. Though he was keen to reiterate that his team is out to make a Dead Space game above all else, he also knows that "more of the same" doesn't quite cut it in a genre where keeping the player off guard is so critical to success. "Isaac has already been through the shit," Papoutsis said of the series' engineer-turned-protagonist. "He's already fought these enemies." Dead Space 2, then, is less a game about dealing with the initial shock of zombified aliens turning one's place of work into a living nightmare and more about using that experience to fight back and find answers.

Don't worry--Dead Space 2 is hardly some Charles Bronson-in-space revenge tale of one man with a score to settle against the villainous necromorphs who have wronged him. Sure, there are changes to Isaac's abilities to make him a more adept fighter. His movement is noticeably less plodding, his melee attacks require less full-body windup, and his telekinesis ability operates more quickly and is thus more suitable for use in combat situations. But for all of that, there are new weapons and new enemies that command the sort of deliberate approach to combat that leads us to believe this game won't be quite the run-and-gun action title that so many other survival horror franchises have evolved into.

One example is Papoutsis' weapon of choice during the demo: the javelin gun. This gun is almost entirely useless when you use its main fire--it merely shoots a dart into enemies or surfaces that causes relatively little damage. But in keeping with the Dead Space tradition of meticulously upgrading nearly every item you use in the game, the javelin gun gains a new alternate fire mode with every upgrade level you reach with it. Papoutsis displayed how a single well-placed shot followed by the incendiary alternate fire can cause a group of necromorphs to burst into flame and thus save you plenty of ammo in the process. Likewise, he showed how you can set traps on the ground by shooting a few electrical rounds on the floor and then wait for your enemies to turn the corner and trigger the alternate fire to send them convulsing in a light show of blue and white sparks.

Balancing out empowering new weapons like the javelin gun are a variety of terrifying new enemy types. The big theme with a lot of new necromorphs seems to be "power in numbers." One of these is the stalker, described by Papoutsis as a velociraptor-like predator prone to hunting in small packs. They're all about group tactics like having one distract you while the others flank your unguarded periphery. The fact that they look quite a bit like alien raptors certainly doesn't help them seem any more cuddly, either. Similar to the stalker is the pack, who trade in strategic formations for sheer numbers. Besides looking like horribly mutated infants charging at you with outstretched arms, these little guys are a threat because they move fast and almost always with plenty of friends around. Killing a single member of the pack doesn't take much more than one or two shots from the most basic of Isaac's weapons--the plasma cutter--but when you're confronted by a half-dozen of them, that's when you really need to worry.

Beyond weapons and enemies, it seems that some of the biggest changes to how you deal with the necromorph invasion come from the setting itself. If you've followed what little has been released about Dead Space 2 thus far, you'll know that the game is set three years after the original and largely takes place in and around a city called the Sprawl--an urban metropolis built on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. And while this new setting allows for much more visual variety than the uniformly dark and brownish-gray corridors of the USG Ishimura--we spied a lot of bright green lighting in a mining facility and a pretty impressive orange-hued view of the Sprawl skyline--what intrigues us most is the way you interact with these settings. Papoutsis readily admitted that a lot of the environments in the original--despite being triumphs in creepy atmosphere--were pretty static when you weren't solving puzzles.

In the sequel, Visceral wants you to do more with the environments. Objects like chairs, tables, and glass windows are now quite destructible, able to be shattered into stray bits and pieces when fired upon. Combine that with the fact that you can now impale and pin down enemies with sharp objects using telekinesis, and you start to see the fun applications of this new tech. However, recklessly firing can also have unforeseen consequences, like when you accidentally shoot the cables suspending the overhead hanging lights. Shoot one cable, and rectangular light might come swinging down and drastically alter the look of the room. Shoot all the cables, and suddenly you've got a shattered light on the ground and a much darker room to navigate.

Our favorite moment came when Papoutsis shot out the safety glass separating Isaac from the powerful vacuum of space. This move can be a double-edged sword: if you're fighting necromorphs close to the glass, you can shoot it out and watch as they get sucked out into the abyss. But if you're close by, you'll get sucked out as well. The only way to avoid a horrible demise is to quickly look for the bright red safety door triggers that will shoot a metal hatch up from the ground and keep you from joining those enemies in the vast emptiness of space. As if the threat of zombie aliens wasn't bad enough.

Will the rest of Dead Space 2 be as scary as the threat of a sudden and violent trip into the abyss of space? We'll just have to wait and see. One thing's for sure though: we should have more on Dead Space 2 at next month's E3, so keep an eye out.

PC Games Trauma Team Review

Previous Trauma Center games have focused on virtual surgery, challenging you to hone your operating skills to a scalpel's edge with punishing difficulty. Trauma Team takes a more holistic approach by staffing six different characters, each with a distinct specialty. No two disciplines play the same way, and the resulting variety is refreshing. Hopping between skills and performing different procedures is easy and rewarding thanks to the slick presentation and sharp controls, though players looking for a tough challenge may not be happy with the lessened difficulty. Still, there is a lot of cleverness to be found in both the gameplay and the writing. Of course, neither is without its flaws, and the game sometimes drags its feet when it should be moving things along. Occasional pacing slowdowns aside, this is a lengthy game that is packed with content and priced affordably. The quality and diversity of the gameplay shine through despite its blemishes, making Trauma Team the most accessible and feature-packed Trauma game to date.

The most familiar discipline here is surgery. The controls use the same slick system as before: you select your tool with the analog stick and perform actions with the remote. It is definitely entertaining (even for TC veterans), and there are some new elements to contend with, but surgery is nowhere near as challenging as it was in previous games. There are no supernatural abilities to contend with, only the story of an amnesiac prisoner called on to perform high-risk surgeries in exchange for years off of his sentence. Surgery is more streamlined in Trauma Team because it plays a supporting role instead of being the franchise player. While some may lament the reduced challenge, this old standby ends up filling its niche quite nicely because the other disciplines round out the game so well.

Orthopedics is similar to surgery in that it deals mainly with cutting on an anesthetized patient, but it plays out a little differently. Rather than selecting your tool on the fly, you use the one you are automatically given. You cut, drill, hammer, and screw in sequence, all the while building up a chain meter for each successful action. This meter offers another layer of instant feedback on top of the neon adjectives displayed after every action, upping the pressure as the procedure continues and your chain grows bigger. Another significant difference is in how the cutting action is presented. Pointing the remote to keep your tool in the designated area is easy at first, but it's not long before the camera starts moving of its own accord, forcing you to keep up with the cut line while staying within the borders of the guide. Soon, the camera starts moving out of sync with the guide, and you have to be even more wary. This is initially aggravating, but once you get the hang of things, it becomes a reasonable, if slightly contrived, challenge. The orthopedic doctor is a muscular specimen named Hank Freebird, a relentless optimist whose extracurricular activities, while almost too goofy, somehow manage to stay within the bounds of sanity.

Emergency care is the most intense of all the disciplines and is handled by a similarly intense doctor who loves to take charge and yell at people. Controlwise, this mode is similar to surgery, but you have only a few tools at your disposal, and your focus is on stabilizing patients so they can be transported to the hospital. Burns, cuts, and broken limbs are your common foes, but the real challenge is that you have to handle multiple patients at a time, and they are all losing health quickly. Switching between patients and administering treatment is an engagingly hectic challenge, though you can find yourself forced to rely overmuch on the magical health-boosting stabilizer injection. Still, this is the most frantic action in Trauma Team, and successfully saving a bloody parade of accident victims is very satisfying.

Endoscopy is a much more deliberate specialty, but it's not without its challenges. The trick here is the controls: you have to pinch A and B and move the remote forward or backward, mimicking the motion of pushing or pulling the endoscope through your patient's inner pathways. Steering and tool usage are both relegated to the nunchuk, and learning how to use the analog stick to cut after being accustomed to using the remote is definitely tricky. The controls are sharp, but tough to master. This helps mitigate the fact that endoscopy is one of the more repetitive disciplines, because it takes a while before you get the hang of things. Trauma Team's resident endoscopist is Tomoe Tachibana, the daughter of a modern-day samurai lord, who is on a quest to attain honor outside of her homeland and prove her worth.

Diagnosis and forensics offer the most divergent gameplay from the Trauma Center standard because they don't feature proper medical procedures. In diagnosis, you talk with your patient, use a stethoscope, and run tests in order to identify symptoms. As the cranky diagnostician, you begrudgingly accept a computerized companion program, but not without a healthy share of cantankerous quips. Using this computer, you attach symptoms to diseases and determine your diagnosis. Looking at actual CT scans and X-rays is cool, even though it amounts to little more than a spot-the-difference minigame. Occasionally the progress of your diagnosis hinges on finding one particular symptom that for one reason or another manages to elude you. While Trauma Team generally does a good job of nudging you in the right direction, it is frustrating when one obscure, illogical, or just plain overlooked detail stands in your way. Patience and perseverance are the keys to overcoming these infrequent barriers, and there is always a solution, no matter how vague.

While diagnosis can require some cleverness, it is forensics that more often requires ingenuity on your part, and this gameplay is some of the most unique and clever that Trauma Team has to offer. As the icy Dr. Kimishima, you work with a helpful FBI lackey to investigate crime scenes, corpses, and audio recordings in order to collect evidence cards. By analyzing or combining these evidence cards in logical ways, you can piece together the puzzle and further your investigation. Doing so also requires that you answer multiple-choice questions about the evidence at hand. Some questions are easy, while others are vague or poorly worded; some answers are surprisingly amusing, and the best questions require you to make logical leaps. Forensics episodes play out in clever and enjoyable ways, though they are susceptible to hang-ups in the same manner as diagnosis episodes. While both offer some of the most intriguing new gameplay mechanics in the game, they are also prone to carrying on too long and rehashing discoveries.

Fortunately, quick readers can thumb ahead and accelerate through these doldrums, but the same can't be said for the cutscenes. The story is told through still shots that, while stylish and appealing, often linger too long. All of the aforementioned doctors play crucial roles in the intertwining story, and though they can border on cliche or downright weird, their personalities and escapades come together quite nicely to create an enjoyable narrative. Throughout the game you can switch between characters and disciplines whenever you like, and this freedom helps you set your own pace. Given that forensics and diagnosis episodes are slower paced and take much longer to complete than the other specialties, it's great to be able to hop over to surgery or emergency care to spice things up.

Trauma Team is a lengthy game that will likely take you tens of hours to complete, and just when you think things are wrapping up, well, think again. When you finally complete the game, you unlock a new difficulty level, as well as new doctor-specific medals that are awarded for performing certain tasks throughout the adventure. You can also play four out of the six disciplines cooperatively (diagnosis and forensics excluded), though surgery, in which you share tools and act simultaneously, is much more interesting than the others, which force you to take turns. All told, Trauma Team is an impressive package with a diverse array of engaging gameplay modes. Though the characters and the activities have their flaws, the whole comes together impressively, making Trauma Team a great bet no matter what your specialty is.

The Good

• Great variety of medical activities
• Sharp controls across the board
• Novel forensics and diagnosis mechanics
• Eclectic cast of characters will win you over.

The Bad

• Some episodes and cutscenes drag on too long
• Obscure solutions can trip you up.