I picked this game up yesterday, been looking forward to it for quite awhile now and I'm happy to say it doesn't disappoint.

Dead space is a sci-fi survival horror game (resident evil in space?) where you take on the role of some engineer guy on a "standard" maintenance mission to repair a broken down mining vessel that lost contact with the USG. Aside from that, it becomes clear that the main character has a vested love interest which was stationed on board the ship. Pretty standard sci-fi/horror plot, however i hear the plot gets pretty good as the game goes on.

You arrive on the mining vessel to find everyone dead (obviously) and now its your job to repair your own ship which was damaged on landing and get the fuck off the ship before whatever killed them kills you as well. You stay in contact with the only surviving members of your crew and they give you objectives to complete which progresses the story line, ie go turn on the power generator so we can activate the food processor and make smoothies.

Objectives generally have you walking down long blood soaked corridors with flashy lights and large expansive bays where terror ensues.

The art direction in the game is quite good, the baddies are unique and scary as fuck. The camera angle is excellent, its responsive and easy to control, and yet it limits your view making you feel vulnerable. Immersion in the game is amazing, as there is no HUD and no fullscreen menus which impair your vision of what's going on around you. Any cricitcal data you need to know is displayed on the back of your RIG suit or on your gun itself (health, ammo, etc.)

Any menus you need to interact with, inventory, mission objectives, map, etc. can all be displayed as holographic images which project out of your suit in front of you.

Supposedly the game is 15 hours long, which is plenty long for a horror game (on my first sit down i could only play for 42 minutes before i needed to take a break in order to regain sanity) and offers much replay value. If you liked Event Horizon, you'll love this game. You never feel invincible or armed to the teeth, enemies tend to be able to sneak up behind you and kill you in 1 hit even on medium difficulty.

Very well done game, i give it a 4.5/5.

oh fuck this sounds exciting

It looks pretty, but in the words of Yahtzee, what doesn't these days? Looks quite repetitive, though (maybe that’s simply a result of the tool-time award thingie). As for the quazi-third person view, while I kinda like the innovative indicators, the view would kill immersion for me: It’s no longer “me in the worldâ€

[quote="Saint Thoth"]It looks pretty, but in the words of Yahtzee, what doesn't these days? Looks quite repetitive, though (maybe that’s simply a result of the tool-time award thingie). As for the quazi-third person view, while I kinda like the innovative indicators, the view would kill immersion for me: It’s no longer “me in the worldâ€

Beat it in just under 12 hours. Great game, but the sheer terror of it all does dwindle away relatively quickly. The game drops you in the lurch very quickly in the beginning, running for your miserable existance w/ no weapons and the (much faster than you) screaming monstrosities hot at your heels. The only time I felt that gripping sense was perhaps twice later, when you fight this unkillable thing that has a penchant for appearing very suddenly and in close proximity.

As far as killing enemies goes, it's usually along the lines of blow off a leg, watch them fall, then blow off an arm to finish them off. Occasionally one of them will require you to blow off both arms before they give up the ghost. Shooting them center of mass will EVENTUALLY kill any enemy, and though blowing off a head usually is not enough to kill them outright, it will reduce most enemies to mindless (headless?) swinging, slowing them down significantly.

Don't get me wrong, I loved this game, but I think it's wrong to call it survival/horror. It's action/horror. I had ammo coming out of my ass on Medium, though I just started a playthrough on Impossible, I'll let you know how the ammo count goes when I get through it.

The plot, as previously mentioned, is not terribly unique, and borrows elements from John Carpenter's The Thing, System Shock 2, and Resident Evil to name just a few, but it puts everything together very well. It won't satisfy Thoth's desire for a more... cerebral experience, but it's good fun.

Yeah i played through 2 levels on medium, decided it was a bit too easy, so I went back and started it back up on hard. On hard, limbs take several direct hits to sever, and ammo is far more sparse. You deffinately find yourself doing alot more running, and a whole lot more dying by trial and error.

When the enemies actually become threatening, it deffinately keeps you on your toes. I'm almost always running out of ammo, and having to rely on running away, or... dying and having to go buy ammo before entering a certain area. Alot of things the game is forgives you for on medium, turns into an insta death on hard. It deffinately makes the playthrough a much scarrier experience. I personally think the game feels more like a resident evil title than a full blown action game. Not quite the confused helplessness of resident evil 2, but deffinately not the armed to the teeth feeling of resident evil 4.

Shooting some enemies in the central body mass results in instadeath, at least on hard mode. Those big fat guys for instance, if you shoot their bellies a whole bunch of those little yellow things come out and eat your face. Shooting the posessed fetises in the body mass as opposed to the tentacles causes them to leap onto your face, and takes about half your health.

only way to play games is on hard Anyways loving it myself except wasting ammo on dead things just because I've been killed by a few whom I thought were expired. Walk over and they stab for insta death lol yay

Hmmmm I think I will pick it up, been awhile since I played something scary, last thing was Doom 3.

Well, the fact that you are playing it twice in a row is a stunningly glowing review IMO. I’ve not played an SP FPS twice in a row since 1994’s Doom2 (and yes, Dead Space is an FPS, just 5 feet to the right). Hell, I’ve not even re-played any episode of “The best FPS of all timeâ€

I actually saw that on scifi last night, though i didn't get a chance to watch it, they were also running a special on Fable 2. Seems a bit out of place for sci-fi to be running video game specials, i guess they've run out of "award winning original series."

Hah, you should see a fully amped-up contact beamer. Goes off like a fucking volcano, and it pretty much doesn't matter where you hit them.

As for desecrating bodies, it was practically an OCD for me. It fucking pays off when those corpse-fucking bats show up though. Room full of black reavers on impossible? No thanks.

As for those fucks insta-killing you on hard... Haven't seen that yet. Determining which guys are playing possum is as easy as using the kinetic-grabber thing on them, though. If you can't pick them up... well, blow off an arm or something.

The one's that crawl on the ground with the scorpion tale have an insta kill thing if they get you from behind. They pin you and rip out your neck.

Also, when you get impaled by a regular necromorph, it does enough damage that it might as well be an instakill, if you've been hit at all it just cuts you in half.

All I can say is... If one of those creepy little head-shaped facehugger things gets ahold of you and kills you... Creepy. Probably the only genuinely creepy way to go in that game, IMO.

the ones with the tentacles?

LOL, I bought an XBOX just to play it, and its so worth it, beat it today. Got the HDMI cable for the tv and wow. Working on trying to beat it on Impossible, the damage is insane, only on Chapter 2 right now on that skill level. I hate those tentacle/head crab things, especially when they come off that lanky monster. I like messing with the fully decked out flamer, reminds me of Aliens, I use that thing on those tentacle head crab creatures, and the ones that look like those babies from Gornachs lair in the first half life. I would play more, but I have an FTX this weekend, and midterms next week ugh...... My other two roommates are fighting between themselves to see who gets to play it when Im away doing the FTX....