Gamer Cinema: Dead Space Downfall

Another in EA's many attempts to make an animated spin-off, Downfall takes place before the cult hit Dead Space, showing just what happened on the Ishumura before Isaac Clarke and crew investigate the infested ship, bascally showing how everyone aboard went crazy and either slaughtered others and themselves, or got slaughtered by the various Necromorphs infesting the ship.

Admittedly I may not be the best person to review this, I'm just not a huge fan of Dead Space. I tried the first game and pretty much found it annoying and silly rather than scary. Though to be fair, that's my reaction to most horror games. Someone who is a huge fan of the Dead Space series may get far more mileage out of this than I, who only has the basest knowledge of the franchise (or they may be far more harsh, who knows).

So I'm going to judge it more on it's merits as a space horror flick, and on that level, it's pretty boilerplate. Nothing awful, mind you, but it's your fairly standard slaughter-fest of one-note characters who barely have time to show off even one defining trait before they get slaughtered, so it's hard to give a rat's ass about any of them. This could be solved with awesome gruesome death scenes and/or great action, but the movie falls pretty short on those as well. I mean, the movie is fairly gruesome, but it doesn't understand the whole idea of less is more and has so much gore from the start it gets old quick. It tries to shove some religious fanaticism in there with a whole subplot about a religious organization that wants the mysterious marker making all this horrible stuff happen, but it's not particularly developed in any meaningful way. Honestly the best thing I can probably say is that it's on par with many big horror releases of the last few years, but only because almost all of them have been unimpressive at best.

That;s all I really have for today, at latest I should have a new post up Wednesday with impressions of Sonic: Lost World for the Wii U, but I'll probably try and get something in before then as well.