Dead Space (series)/YMMV

• Cliché Storm: A fake Artifact of Doom is found on a planet about to be strip-mined by a Mega Corp, and suddenly all hell breaks loose? Somehow, the engineer is better at surviving than the actual military? There's a massive Government Conspiracy about the freaky space zombies? Fun, not exactly breaking new ground.
  • Word of God admitted that the series is a love letter to the sci-fi and sci-fi horror genres in general.
• Complete Monster: Kendra. She didn't say a single word about the Necromorphs despite the fact that as a government agent she surely knew more about what was going on than Isaac or Hammond. Then she manipulated Isaac into doing most of the work and isolated Hammond so he couldn't communicate with Isaac. Then she killed Doctor Kyne and left Isaac to die onboard the Ishimura, and then tried to leave him again on Aegis VII after showing him the entire video of Nicole committing suicide just to prove to him that he was insane. Then there's Mercer, who experiments on splicing necromorph and human DNA together, and believes that nercomorphs are the next step in human evolution.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The Lurkers are actually dead babies that the necromorphs have had no qualms with assimilating into their ranks. Think zombie babies are bad? Wait until you see the grapple kill Isaac uses against the Lurkers, which involves him throwing it to the floor and punting it across the room.
• Follow the Leader: Dead Space was very obviously inspired by early footage of Dark Sector, back when the latter game was set in space and featured a protagonist in a similar suit fighting space zombies; even the names are similar. In a way averted, as in the end Dark Sector didn't follow its own early footage.
  • The gameplay meanwhile, shares some similarities to Resident Evil 4, from the camera angles, to the inventory, to the aiming and shooting. But the formula is tweaked enough that it is not bad.
• Goddamn Bats: Swarmers are mostly annoying... unless encountered with other stronger Necromorphs.
• Good Bad Bugs: When fighting a Brute, run down some stairs. They will turn and walk away from you. At which point you can unleash hell on them. Same happens if they're confronted by a narrow doorway, even though they have been shown to be able to completely demolish doors when the situation requires them to.
  • And let's just say that Necromorphs are really bad about opening doors (i.e. they can't). While this will have limited application in most cases, you can use it to gradually wear them down while they remain unable to retaliate.
• Hell Is That Noise: The Divider give off a deep, unsettling groan as you get approach one.
• Iron Woobie: You'll really want to give Isaac a hug after his ordeal is over.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks: According to some, you don't want to play Dead Space on anything below Hard.
• Memetic Mutation: About Isaac's Curb Stomp of DOOM.
• Moral Event Horizon: Both Big Bads.
  • Mercer killing Temple and Cross.
  • The entire scene with Kendra's killing of Kyne and revealing that she's The Mole.
• Nightmare Retardant: The Hive Mind. All of the previous enemies, like the ones detailed above, kept you on your toes and your gun pointed up and into the shadows of the Ishimura's bowels just in case they try something. With the Hive Mind just there when you fight it, it's not as scary.
  • Fridge Logic: Instead of only preventing Isaac from running outside of a somewhat generous circular area but otherwise only occasionally attacking, why doesn't the Hive Mind just swipe its tentacles madly at Isaac as it did to Kendra ?
    • Because Kendra deserved it and Isaac, at this point, has been through enough without getting haphazardly crushed to a pulp.
  • At any rate, the Nightmare Fuel is restored if you simply look at the chunk of Aegis VII that's free-falling just above where you fight the Hive Mind.
• Paranoia Fuel: You will DREAD going into a room full of corpses... Not because of what killed them, mind you but because the corpses themselves might try to off you.
  • You may develop an extreme phobia of ventilation shafts from this game as well.
  • Screw that - where did all that inert biomass growing all over the walls, floors, and ceilings come from? Ordinary dust, which is made up of dead skin that has flaked off. Bet you want to dust every single surface in your house now, don't you?
  • After one of the first Necromorph encounters, you may find yourself somewhat wary of elevators.
  • The Hunter, AKA: that damn regenerating Necromorph. Similar to the SA-X from Metroid Fusion, although it lacks the magnificently tense scripted scenes. Still, just knowing it's around somewhere in the ship is quite freaky.
• Peril Rollover: "Great, you fixed the engines so we won't crash. Now you have to go and shoot down all the asteroids that are about to smash us to pieces. After that there's this giant monster in hydroponics that's screwing up our oxygen..."
• Punch-Packing Pistol
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Compare and contrast Run Like Hell. To quote Chapter 11 of the Let's Play of DS;

Run Like Hell follows a character in deep space, separated from his girlfriend, who's trained in medicine. The station has been attacked by a previously unknown alien race, which has massacred basically everybody. The main character's lady sometimes sends him messages to show that she's okay.


The enemies, too, are quite similar. There are "Cutters", with scythe-blades for arms. There are "Brutes", who are huge, heavily-muscled berserkers who can resist massive gunfire. There are "Scouts", creatures with a scorpion tail. There are "Scout Sprites", breakaway enemies that serve as suicide bombers. There are "Elites", who can take human heads and put them atop their own bodies. And there is "Biomass", which converts the environment into an area appropriate for the aliens.

• That One Boss: the giant space slug boss at the end of chapter eight involves using the most infuriating turret system ever to defeat. You start with 100% shields. One hit from a projectile knocks 10% of your shields down. The projectiles all move far, far faster than you can turn the gun. The kicker? One of the secret achievements for the game is to defeat the boss with over 50% of the turret's shields remaining. Uh, no.
  • This is hardly an issue with the PC version, which has the option to customize your aiming sensitivity. One wonders why the dev team didn't give console gamers a similar option, especially since most modern console shooters do.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Every single space walk in the game qualifies as this.