In the world of Dead Space, entire planets are cracked open and mined for their resources. However, those who played through the first game know that the cracking of Aegis VII was... eventful. At the end of Dead Space, engineer extraordinaire Isaac Clarke dropped "the cork" back into its place. Of course, when a continent-sized landmass plummets towards a celestial body with sufficient velocity, it's usually safe to say that the celestial body in question is doomed. The Marker has been shattered into thousands (perhaps millions) of tiny pieces, and Aegis VII is about to go bye-bye. Of course, the highly-influential Church of Unitology isn't about to leave the cornerstone of its teachings on a planet that could explode at any minute. So, the USG O'Bannon (could their sci-fi references be any less transparent?) is officially sent to keep the planet from blowing up... officially, anyway.
Dead Space: Aftermath is the story of what happened on Aegis VII during that mission. However, it is retroactively told from the perspectives of four crew members who have been detained by Church of Unitology spooks. If you've got any experience with Dead Space, know that just about everything falls into place exactly the way you expect it to. One of the crew members is driven into a hallucinatory fit of homicidal insanity by a fragment of the Marker, one is a faceless everyman who loses his cousin to said hallucinatory fit of homicidal insanity, one is a Unitologist (surprise) who ends up responsible for the Necromorph outbreak on the O'Bannon. The last is a woman who engaged in an affair with Dr. Stross, the Unitologist. Everything comes across as boilerplate survival horror, except for a completely silly sequence at the end that feels ripped straight out of The Lord of the Rings. We get a handful of contrived personal moments with just about everyone (including the man driven insane by the Marker, who continuously hallucinates about his dead daughter). However, the poor quality of the story and writing reduces the movie's cast to one-dimensional meat puppets. They swear, kill things, run away, swear some more, and die. As a result, you won't care about any of them.
I'm not saying that Dead Space: Aftermath is completely devoid of entertainment value. Some scenes in Aftermath are interesting. Most notable are the scenes in which Church of Unitology goons torture their prisoners. There's even a running gag that involves Visceral's last game, Dante's Inferno. It also continues an odd trend. The art style changes every now and then, just like in Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, another bad animated movie with interesting (if schizophrenic) art direction. One of the characters in this movie actually has the gall to say that the movie is better than the game it's based on! However, Dead Space: Aftermath never feels like it's worth watching.
If you were hoping for one final taste of Dead Space 2 before the game drops next week, or at least for some substantial extras, you won't find anything good in this package. Included on this disc are four trailers, two of which aren't even game-related. As a matter of fact, those two are both vampire movies. Okay...
With substandard releases like Dead Space Ignition and Dead Space: Aftermath, it almost feels as if someone wants me to be less excited about Dead Space 2. Quite the contrary, actually. I can't wait to play the sequel, and there isn't a doubt in my mind that it will be a good game. However, I have a hard time believing that even the most devout of Marker-heads will get much satisfaction from Dead Space: Aftermath.
