Inexplicably, the player that doesn’t need to use thought has their resources regenerate way faster than the player who has to think and place towers. System Override feels as pointless in multiplayer as it does in single, although it’s possible we were missing some element to make it fair – we saw what we expected, which was the player sending bots would have a massive advantage by just spamming buttons while the other player scrambles to set up towers. Trace Route is even more fun against a human opponent, and what’s neat is that the tracks are different from those in single-player. There is also local multiplayer for each minigame. There are leaderboards for competing to get the best times in the three minigames, and there are players participating in them, so we guess people are getting some fun out of them. The final kicker is that we were promised four different endings, but it simply isn’t true. The really bizarre aspect of the multiple pathways through the story is that one of the characters is a completely different person in half of the story threads, and this difference isn’t explained and doesn’t make any sense. We’re supposed to see the initial outbreak of the necromorphs, and yet they just show up in a random hallway – there’s no explanation for how they got to the Sprawl. The big letdown, though, is that the story provides nothing significant to set up Dead Space 2. The dialogue is pretty bad, as is the voice acting. It moves, slightly, but the characters’ mouths don’t move, which is initially distracting, although we got used to it. It’s ugly and cheap-looking, with an art “style” that looks like preliminary story boards rather than a finished product. What about the relevance to Dead Space? Well, the motion comic that creates excuses for you to hack into all kinds of things is a bit of a mess. So, out of three minigames, we have one good one, one decent one, and one totally pointless one. Above: Here's Hardware Crack, the other decent minigame.

Dead space ignition vacillating