Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Rent it first"

We once again take control of Isaac Clarke, having survived his previous encounters with the Necromorphs is once again thrown into a nightmarish situation as he tries to survive yet again.

In terms of story... meh. It's the usual try to survive, shoot first ask questions later, obvious plot twists and 1 dimensional characters. In an attempt to provide narrative, the Isaac has gone from never removing his helmet or saying a single word regardless of the situation, to having the irresistible urge to remove said helmet every 5 minutes and talk about the plot which we just read/heard about from the various logs we stole from all the corpses (they wont need them anymore).

The game-play mechanics continue to be fairly solid, with the control scheme mainly imported from Dead Space 1, with a couple of variations including movement in zero gravity zones, which to be honest were not a bad addition at all.

My main issue with the game is the lack of horror and genuine scares. I am a self-confessed fan of the survival horror genre, and it saddens me when the 'horror' aspect of a game is lost. Whilst they do a good job in building and maintaining a tense atmosphere with clever lighting, stage design and SFX, they ruin it by making the monsters just plain annoying! Big scary monsters is fine, but in portions, not simply thrown at you in waves and locked in until you defeat them all (may work once or twice in a game, but it should not be consistent feature in this genre). But this is more of a general issue with 'horror' games at the moment (do not get me started on the Resident Evil series). Less action, more survival!

But other than that, a fairly good solid game.