Difficulty:

Just Right

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

Good and Bad:

+ Makes you want to kill the aliens that you kill.
+ Good and solid control layout. The game doesn't play like RE5.
+ Strategic Disemberment is a neat gameplay trick.
+ Surreal and insanely gruesome.

- Even with the in-game mechanics, the gameplay feels repetitive.
- Isaac's helmet design might make you chuckle at first.
- No multiplayer.
- Frequent framerate slowdowns on the console.
- Tasteless EA marketing gimmicks and insulting DLC.
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I. INTRODUCTION

"Strap on your anti-stress spacesuits, and eat all your flowers. We're in space."
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Dead Space is not a stroll in a park. Its not a luxury ride or an easy cruise through a ship. Its a fight for survival, and its a nightmare. Whether or not you will survive the ordeal of the monsters, the originality of the atomesphere, or the repetitivity of the game is unkown. But what can you say about Dead Space? Its fun, its boring, its worth buying for its enviornment but the gameplay itself can feel lacking. It feels like a game that started as one thing and as it managed to stick with one idea, it just drags on for too long. That's the way you might feel when playing Dead Space. Aging objectives and duplicate goals drag down on the score of what could have been a great game with a very surreal surrounding and an insane story.

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II. Story

"Are we there yet? *crash*"
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The story of Dead Space is set in the year 2414 A.D and opens up with a spaceship known as the USG Ishimura dispatching a smaller ship called the Kellion to deliver a stress signal during a mining operation. After Kellion mysteriously crashes right into the space dock, the uninjured crew arrise from the wreckage in an attempt to find a way to escape the Ishimura.

The potagonist for this game is an engineer named Isaac Clarke (an easter-egg notes that he is an inspiration of fiction novel writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke). Isaac happened to be on the Kellion, and you control the poor, unlucky guy in a third-person view. Isaac eventually witnesses an outbreak of nasty alien creatures within the Ishimura and from this point onward, the game becomes more of a fight for Isaac's mere survival than anything else until rescue arrives for him.

In Dead Space, Isaac does not talk but everyone else in the game has a big mouth and fills up the dialouge for the rest of the story. The two characters from Isaac's crew that didn't get ripped to bits are Hammond and Daniels, and they frequently contact Isaac by radio. Isaac's lover Nicole also makes an appearance in the game and is the only thing that Isaac cares about other than his own survival. Many times, you will get the chance to encounter the Ishimara's stranded phycosocial survivors, and there are so many twists in the plot that you never feel that you can trust anyone but you and your gun.

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III. Gameplay

"Where do the batteries of the pulse rifle go?"
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In the third-person adventure, Isaac has the misfourtune of travelling through the ship's dark interior, noting the trail of corpses, red herrings, weird visions, and other awkward crap along the way. The enviornment is constantly disturbing and every room you enter is devoid of life, or more often when the power is out, light. Or is there life? Yes, there is. There's a presence inside the ship that wants you dead and while you don't always see a threat, you can still hear the growls of something more-than-human in the next disturbing scene you enter. Sometimes while walking down a hallway presumably all alone, you will turn around immediatly at the noisy feet of someone -- or something -- scurry behind you only to realize that it was just a dead body that you stepped on. In some parts of the ship, Isaac must adapt to low-gravity puzzles and rush through vaccumed areas with no oxygen. Its even worse when you encounter hostiles in these horrible, blood-curdling situations. Dead Space has ambience that will truly make you not want to be in Isaac's shoes. Or at least in his silly-looking helmet.

The hideous monsters that restlessly haunt you during the game are called Necromorphs who used to be regular humans before becoming subjected to an insane mutation. It doesn't matter how ugly one is from another, good people died and now you have to defeat them as you go. When running on the console, the game can handle no more than 3 enemies onscreen without bogging down the framerate, and this can lead to some occasionally troublesome alien firefights. Some of the creatures you find are small like the Space Babies who can jump from the walls, ceiling, and floor which makes them hard to shoot. Some creatures are smaller and can latch onto your neck in an attempt to rip off your head. Some creatures are so big that they can simply tear it off within seconds. Many of your enemies have claws, teeth and sometimes even weapons. If a Necromorph gets to you before you can effectively put it down, it can grab onto Isaac which initiates a button tapping sequence where you must frantically mash the 'A' button in hopes of escaping the merciless onslaught. What happens after that is always brutal, whether you manage to break free or not.

Every Necromorph monster has a means of attack. Logically, every enemy has a weakness, but the way to kill an enemy may not always be obvious. In most cases, shooting a Necromorph's head clean off won't kill it. Instead, Isaac must adapt to a stragegy called Strategic Dismemberment. This involves using his weapons to gradually shoot or saw off an enemy's limbs until it bleeds out, which is the best and most effective way to kill it. This clever twist to the mainstream shooter genre revolutionizes the way we kill insanely ugly freaks in video games. And you just got to love it.

Fourtunetly, not everything in Dead Space is hostile, just most of it. The aforomentioned crew survivors contact Isaac, constantly giving him orders and objectives to run around the ships activating offline support systems in order to keep everyone alive. The objectives are repetitive A-B point lacklusters and they could've had much more potential, but at least you still feel like your fighting for your life. Isaac can also find audio logs lying around the ship, and these help the story flow more smoothly and fill in blanks of the story or questions you might have with stories of scientists' experiments. Sometimes you get a chance to meet other live survivors of the ship but many of them have been driven insane and kill each other. In the worst case, you sometimes are forced to helplessly watch your brethen get shred to pieces by a Necromorph through a glass window in another room. The remorseless brutality of the aliens puts alot of weight on your actions throughout the course of the game and gives the player something to fight for, as well as an immesurable amount of grudge towards the creatures you fight which makes killing them more enjoyable (i.e. the urge to stomp on a Necromorph into bloody bits even after its dead).

Isaac is not a trained soldier, so while he can get weapons such as the Plasma Rilfe and Flamethrower, he is used to making due with futuristic mineral cutting devices that he can use skillfully for killing his foes. Isaac also has the weird and completely random ability of physic manipulation -- he can grab onto moveable objects with a beam protracted from his hand and toss them around in combat or move them around to solve puzzles. His other ability is the interesting Statis - the ability to slow down the 'movement' of an object or creature without slowing down the actual time or surrounding objects. Statis is a great way to slow down an enemy long enough for you to have an easy time killing it, but the only problem is that Statis uses up energy. For this reason, Isaac will have to collect Statis recharge packs that replenish this energy. He'll also find other items like ammo or medpacks scattered around the ship, and get to use/sort/drop them out to his advantage with the help of a frustrating on-screen RPG inventory system.

During the course of Dead Space you can find stations to upgrade your weapons (if you can find items called Pulse Nodes), and you can purchase ammo or suit upgrades at in-game stores placed around the ship. When you collect credits or artifacts in game, you can visit these stores to purchase all sorts of things. Even more kitsch, Electronic Arts taunts you with downloadable content for the game on the Xbox Live Marketplace that costs actual money. If you pay the cheapskate developers an unreasonable price, you can receive an overpowered suit or a rediculous weapon so insanely powerful that you can shoot it once at a Necromorph and it will be like you dropped an elephant on it. The message being pointed out is basically "Pay us real-life money and we'll make the game easier for you!". Experienced players will feel insulted.

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V. Presentation, (Graphics, Sound, etc.)

"Shhhhh!!! Did you hear that?!?!"
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Dead Space's sound should be mentioned first as it is the most impressive. The game presents the enviornment in a very unpleasant mood. With echoes and distant screams abound, both you and Isaac know that you're not alone in this living hell. The voice acting feels awkward and the music is mostly forgettably, but all the other sounds for the game are good enough. The game best trick for atomesphere seems to be derrived from the original Turok on the N64 where one distant industrial sound is taken and slowly increases in pitch to produce a nerving, moodily moan. It does this well and the graphics look fine for the game too. Many might say that the game looks like a 3rd person version of Doom 3 or (for more ignorant people) Halo, but the art style for Dead Space more of a parody to fans of Star Trek. Almost everything in the game looks like it is made out of metal, finely dark and dirty as the ambient noise that you hear. The characters look very realistic and characteristic up close (if you get to them before they die) and all of the monsters are walking piles of rotten flesh with dark, oily slime for blood.

The graphics are only a bit questionable with Isaac himself. He wears a metallic space suit and, because of the exclusion of the in-game hud, has his suit's health meter attached to his back and his ammo counter on his gun. Every graphic interference that shows up during gameplay is a hologram projected from Isaac's suit, so this definetely lets you feel more immersed in the game. However, Isaac's helmet design looks a little rediculous. Before you get the chance to upgrade it, it has the arrangement of bright lights that look like a sad cheesy face. It even lights up brighter when he gets attacked. Many people will disagree with me but seeing his face blink on and off rapidly as a huge alien arm pulls him down a pit is just hilarious.

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IV. Conclusion

"If you scream in Space, can anybody hear you?"
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Dead Space is a good game, but looking at the game is slightly better than playing it. The objectives can be repetitive to the extent of ruling over the aim of the game - the joy of killing monsters by shooting their limbs off. Tangibly, many things found in Dead Space are stunning, but the whole thing gets old too quickly. Necromorphs to pop out of places that start to become predictable, the trap of boring mission objectives makes it hard to remember the game's lengthy chapters or what you've done so far, and this is hardly made up for upgradable weapons or unlockable acheivements. Sadly, there is no multiplayer to give you grace either. The general point is that too much of a good thing gets boring, and that's definetely what goes on in Dead Space. So, if you decide to play Dead Space, be sure to kill everything and anything that moves to get the most out of your money from this shocking adventure of scrambled guts and space horror by EA.