Welcome to the USG Repetitive.
The cliches and unoriginality begins with the game's set-up. You suit up as engineer Issac Clarke, who is sent out with tech specialist Kendra Daniels and security officer Zach Hammond to check out the USG Ishimura, a space vessel that has mysteriously gone silent. Docking lights don't show up and communication is a garbled, incomprehensible mess at best. In minutes, massive technical fubars forces your ship to crash into the docking bay of the Ishimura. Your ship's still able enough to get you off the Ishimura after this brief, typical search and repair mission. Obviously, things don't go as planned and everything goes straight to hell in mere minutes. Brilliant and unpredictable, if Dead Space was the first of its kind.
A third of your small crew is killed instantly by necromorphs, the once-living now turned into relentless, merciless monstrosities. Separated from Daniels and Hammond, they'll constantly give you objectives to complete, while the plot slowly develops into an average narrative and then reaches its epic conclusion. It's a gameplay structure that works for 3 hours. Yes, your objectives make sense, but this process repeats and restarts endlessly. There's little in the sense of progress, because for every one step forward, you take another back because of some out-of-the-blue mishap that's keeping you from getting off this ship. Eventually, Kendra's nagging gets annoying (she even screams at you to kill something 50x bigger than you at one point) and Hammond's objectives are almost as irritating. What all this does is sap the game's atmosphere and tension.
That's an unbelievably huge problem for a game like Dead Space. Once you begin to guess correctly as to what will happen next, the game's structure becomes obvious and robs it of any sort of tension and atmosphere. You know there's going to be a necromorph popping out of those faraway vents, because a health pack is conveniently place in front of it. You know one of the critters are going to jump out of that pile of corpses and "startle" you. You know the most sterile rooms in the game are going to get locked down in a quarantine, which will force you to fight waves of necromorphs. This laziness from the developers saps the game of not only atmosphere and tension, but also genuine fear. Worst of all, these scripted instances get really, really annoying after they occur for the umpteenth time.
The game's story isn't going to keep you drawn, either. Audio and text logs scrape at the surface, but don't develop into anything substantial. Twists are predictable and while the conclusion is exciting, there's not a lot that's really answered. You do get backstory logs after finishing the game once, but they don't add to game's plot substantially. Even more lacking is any emotional connection between you and Issac. Sure, he has a girlfriend, and you're told that Issac likes her very much, but so what? The developers tell us how to feel, but that's nothing if they don't have the emotional content to back it up and Dead Space doesn't have it. It's also hard to feel for a man who's mute. Admittedly, the same complaint can be levied against the enigmatic Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series, but Valve's deft execution means you care for Freeman's friends and they care for you, which creates an emotional link between you and Freeman. But enough digression.
So, peeling back Dead Space's shallow and flawed exterior reveals a functional and fairly enjoyable shooter. You start with the plasma cutter, which as the name implies, cuts stuff. That's great, because the game's combat emphasizes cutting off the limbs of necromorphs in your way. In fact, the game wants you to utilize this so much so that it reminds you three times in the course of five minutes. It's mildly insulting, but it is an important facet of the combat if you play the game on a difficultly above Normal. Besides the fact that cutting off limbs does extra damage, cutting off legs will force necromorphs to crawl, which gives you some breathing room to reload, run away, or use the game's inventory system, which doesn't pause the game. This basic step in the game's combat doesn't change much, with the exception of a few enemy types. The larger issue is that you're going to do a lot of it and there's little variation in it, because the AI mostly rushes you with reckless abandon. Some fall into rudimentary patterns that are easily discovered and the bosses, while huge and daunting are uncreative; shoot obvious weak spots and that settles it. The game's concept of challenge is just as uncreative. Necromorphs encountered before are donned with symbiote-skin, which buffs up their resilience and strength. Later on, the game sends waves of these guys at you to inflate the difficulty. It's just plain lazy. Just like nearly everything in Dead Space, the combat is repetitive.
If you're ever in trouble, you can use a stasis charge that'll slow necromorphs to a crawl. It makes combat more methodical and almost too easy at times. Still, you can only shoot so many charges at any given time, and fiddling with the inventory trying to use a stasis pack gets the blood pumping. It's a balanced element of the game. Dead Space also has the obligatory gravity gun, just renamed to kinesis. You'll be able chuck stuff with it, like all the convenient gas canisters littered throughout the ship, but you'll mostly use it to solve rudimentary puzzles. Sometimes, you'll use both stasis and kinesis in tandem to solve these riddles, which is kind of neat, until you do it over and over again. At best, the puzzles are a nice change of pace from all the shooting, at worst, it's boring. It's a pretty even split between the two and since there aren't too much of them, puzzles don't hurt or improve Dead Space. They're just sort of there.
When you're not in combat or solving those intense brain teasers, you're usually traversing through zero-g areas or decompressed space, the bad one that doesn't have oxygen. Zero-g is fun and basically plays like a more freeform version of Prey's gravity walkways, allowing you jump and float across long distances, get upside down and confused as you attempt to get your bearings with every jump. The physics in action here are particularly impressive. Corpses and objects drift about and liquids float about listlessly, giving a real sense of weightlessness. It's a very gimmicky element, because these sections of the game aren't all that different, just a bit more confusing because of all the perspective shifts, but they're unique and more importantly, fun. The space trek elements are arguably even cooler, because they're presented extremely well; colors are desaturated and sound is muffled and muted, giving off the impression that you're really in space. A draining oxygen meter does attempt to instill a sense of urgency, but an oxygen recharge station or oxygen tanks seem to be present whenever you're hoofing it out it there in space. Both the zero-g and space sections don't really evolve or change throughout the game, but they're welcomed and the few twists they put into the combat is refreshing.
If you're not doing either, then you're spending time on buying equipment at one of the stores or upgrading various aspects of Issac through upgrade benches. Credits are the game's currency, and you'll find it off of corpses and whatnot or you can sell extra stuff in your inventory for some cash. The store, while convenient, makes resource management non-existent, because there's always enough cash to buy ammo or health on even the Hard difficulty. The store brings only good intentions, but hampers the game. One thing it does do well, however, is the implementation of schematics. Finding new schematics for weapons, suits and items is a great way of introducing new items to the store. Simply find a schematic and the store will immediately download the new items and will be included in the game's store. It's simple, but very effective.
The upgrade system is executed well. Throughout the game, you'll find power nodes and you'll use them on upgrade benches to upgrade your suit, stasis, kinesis, and all the weapons you have on you. Each upgradeable part has their own tech tree and if you spread your power nodes too thin, you'll end up with a lot of junk, especially on harder difficulties. Some upgrades are completely useless, like expansion of the oxygen tank on your suit and the even more pointless kinesis upgrades, but all weapon upgrades are important and it just depends on your preference. Specializing in a weapon also brings consequences, because ammo drops are random and you might not get the ammo you need for your gun, forcing you to run back to the store and buy some. You'll often be given the opportunity to use power nodes on locked doors, which always house tons of goodies, so there's some decision-making to be had. Sure, you can buy more nodes at shops, but you'll be begging for cash if you do this on a regular basis.
If you couldn't tell already, the gameplay and the atmosphere (which is arguably more important for a game like Dead Space) are riddled with problems, big and small. On the bright side, its presentation is outstanding. Dead Space looks great and while its texture quality isn't the sharpest and repetition is once again present, it's nice to look at it. Its art direction is questionable – Why is everything so cold and metallic? Who the hell wouldn't lose their minds living here? Admittedly, this is more of a criticism directed to all sci-fi horrors that aim for this drab, depressing direction, but Dead Space continues this sad tradition. The good news is that the gore-factor is huge in Dead Space and a lot of work has gone into the death animations in particular. They completely trump the standards that Resident Evil 4 set by a huge margin. And in general, the animations are excellent. The motion-captured sequences look fantastic, character models emote incredibly well, Issac's animations are spot-on and necromorphs move with menace. Also, big kudos to HUD-less interface; health is displayed on the suit's spine, and the inventory opens up in real-time and is 3-D. Same goes to video and audio feeds, really keeping you in the game. The immersion factor is there, only if everything else in Dead Space locked into place.
The audio is even better. Excellent voice-acting makes the game's so-so script sound way better than it should and sound effects are expertly crafted. Weapons sound punchy, necromorphs sound like savages with insane bloodlust, and scattered ambient sounds, like the distant scream, or the spinning pantry makes it feel like the Ishimura still houses a few unlucky survivors, desperately clinging onto their lives. The music consists mostly of high strings and it's pretty good, but its implementation is questionable. Silence is sometimes the most effective tool to establish an unsettling mood, but Dead Space has none of that and allows Jason Graves' score to permeate almost every moment of the game. Problem aside, Dead Space has superb sound.
Dead Space's length is standard for this day and age, but if you want to play it again for whatever reason, you can start a new game with some extra credits, nodes and a new suit schematic. You won't be able to start a new game on a different difficulty, because that'd be lame. Dead Space initially wows with its presentation and stifling atmosphere, but a couple hours in, it turns into something more rote and by the end, it's hard to leave satisfied. Repetition is what undoes this shooter and if EA hasn't realized this by the time they start up work on the sequel, which they already have, then there's little hope for this already ailing franchise.