Dead Space 2 Mini-Strategy Guide
I freaking love this game. Here are some observations I've made so far.
General Strategy
There are two important considerations in this game: mechanics and efficiency. Mechanics are the basics that are shared across most shooters. Things like aiming, positional awareness, pathfinding, and skill usage fall under mechanics. This game has really interesting mechanics like dismemberment and stasis, but for the most part if you are good at most shooters you will figure these aspects of the game out pretty quickly.
The other main consideration is efficiency. This is unlike most shooters because, if you tune the difficulty properly, you will find that resource management is a serious challenge in this game. By resource management, I mean "do I have enough bullets to kill all the zombies?" Making decisions that lead to the answer being yes is the other really interesting thing about dead space.
Mechanics
Let's get this part out of the way.
Stay out of aim mode until you are ready to shoot. The camera turns more quickly in normal mode, so you can react to surprise attacks better in this mode.
Once you have killed an enemy, if you have the "APM," try to pick up one of their claws to use against another enemy. It seems to do about as much damage as an upgraded plasma cutter shot.
Melee might as well not exist for all the good it does. However, you do have to hit an enemy once more after it is dead to get its loot. The stomp is the best way to get this done most of the time. Be careful that the enemy is actually dead (use tk to pick off one of its claws, for example).
Stasis recharges automatically in this game, although the cooldown is long. That said, if you are engaging an enemy and you have full stasis, you should use it if you think there is any chance you will miss or waste any shots. It's always wise to trade an unlimited resource for a limited one.
As in Dead Space 1, backing away from enemies in a large room is a bad idea. You know what is in front of you, but you don't know what is behind you. If there are too many enemies in front, use stasis to slow them down and dismember them while slowly advancing. If you must fall back, make sure to turn and run, not backpedal.
Upgrades
Most weapons have a few low-hanging fruit upgrade options. Focus on damage nodes. If you play carefully, reload speed, fire rate, and magazine size will almost never matter. Except for damage, all other properties tend to decrease your efficiency: they encourage firing faster, not better. On the other hand, damage tends to increase your efficiency, since it will take fewer rounds to cut off that necro's limb with more damage.
The special node for the plasma cutter does not seem to be worth the power modules it takes to get there. Stop at the last damage node.
You can boost the line gun's damage by 40% with just three nodes. These nodes are more efficient than any of the other bread-and-butter weapons that I've played with. Make sure to get these early.
The line gun's "width" attribute is like damage. More width makes the weapon more efficient, although only in a certain limited set of circumstances. This game seems to have fewer situations where there are tons of enemies running at you in a narrow corridor compared to Dead Space 1.
Maximally upgrade stasis as soon as possible.
Consider base damage when deciding what to upgrade. The plasma cutter has 10 base damage. Each upgrade grants 20% more damage of base damage. The line gun also has 20% upgrades, but base damage is 15. That said, since the line gun often severs two limbs (both legs), more damage might just be overkill.
Also be sure to consider how much bonus damage you are getting per node spent.
Unless you are playing on hardcore, wait until later to invest in HP. More HP generally speaking does not increase your efficiency, because it takes the same number of health packs to recharge it.
Always carry an extra power node. So far as I can tell, the node-locked rooms contain strictly more than ten thousand credits worth of equipment. At worst, you can sell the entire contents and come out with more than a power node's worth of credits.
Equipment
Each suit gives you armor, slots, and a special power. You keep all of these except the special power if you revert suits. If you want to min-max, switch to the vintage suit whenever you are shopping. The security suit is better when you are out and about. Don't know about the later suits as I have not gotten there yet.
Don't buy weapons you don't plan to use. The game seems to prioritize the weapons you are carrying when dropping ammunition.


