The 2 words you'll say alot while playing this game: Holy s**t!
Dead Space 2 takes place 3 years after the first one. Poor Issac Clarke is sitting in a room, being interviewed about the nightmares he's having about his dead girlfriend, Nicole. The first thing you might notice - besides Nicole's ugliness - is that Issac talks. What?! The silent protagonist from the 1st game has a voice? Yep. While he doesn't have alot of funny one liners or snappy comebacks, he gets the point across. About a minute later, some guy is trying to help you escape from where you are. Next thing you know, he's getting impaled from multiple areas and starts to transform into a Necromorph right before your eyes. HOLY S**T! So now your on your own as you make your escape from that first area, which is now crawling with Necromorphs. But you wonder, how is another outbreak starting if you destroyed the Marker? Well you can thank a man named Tiedmann for that. Apparently he also wants to see you as well, and its not for a cup of tea, I'll tell ya that. Mostly the story takes a back seat to all the action, but where your going, the story just tells itself: you just have to stay alive.
What you'll soon notice is that not much has changed from the 1st game: you'll still get the same weapons (along with some new ones, like the Javelin Gun) to dismember and blast the Necromorphs to bits with, there will be lots of creepy, jump out of your seat, holy s**t moments, no HUD, etc. But there have been small changes which streamlines the experience. For example, you can reload by simply pressing X, instead of having to aim and then reload. Stasis recharges over time, but you can still use Stasis pack to recharge stasis fully. And the best change, is that in zero-G environments, you don't have to use that crappy zero-G jump: instead, Issac's suit now has thrusters to fly around in zero-G freely, which is awesome. Also the the new enemies add alot more variety to the gunplay than just "strategic dismemberment". Remember how in the first game they shoved the whole "strategic dismememberment" thing down your throat? In this game, some of the enemies shoot projectiles from a distance, so its not as simple as sitting in a corner blasting away at enemies, and some of the new weapons - and new secondary functions, like a grenade launcher added to the Pulse Rifle - make the "strategic dismemberment" thing take a backseat to just good old-fashioned gunplay, which isn't a bad thing. The technical presentation of the game is outstanding: great graphics, beautiful lighting and audio effects put the fear factor of this game through the roof. So, go ahead, turn up the sound and turn off the lights and get ready to get the crap scarred out of you.
With everything that happens in this game, Dead Space 2 does a magnificent job in keeping the action and survival horror elements in prefect harmony. Sure, there might not be a bunch of huge changes, but that's not a bad thing. With all the frightening moments in Dead Space 2, these are the 2 words you'll say alot while playing this game: Holy s**t!