Scary, atmospheric, bloody, brutal and extremely engrossing but lacks new and original ideas.
The game takes place in 2414, you play as Isaac Clarke, an Engineer. You and your crew mates have received a distress call from a massive Planet Cracker-class mining ship, known as the USG Ishimura. Your shuttle nearly crashes but you and your team manage to dock the ship. As you enter the dark corridors of the mining ship, you find no welcome and nobody. Soon you are separated from your team and the struggle for survival begins. As you run from the horribly mutated Necromorphs, seeking shelter only to find more corpses and more enemies trying to rip you to pieces. Then you realize that you cannot go back now and no help is coming.
The story of Dead Space isn't very original but it is told in a very good way and keeps you hooked in right from the beginning. The longer you play the game, the more engrossing it gets. The protagonist of Dead Space (Isaac) gets the worst of the worst and is the only one of the characters who actually never feels safe throughout the whole game. Also, even though he is the only character who doesn't say a word, you still feel sorry for him because of what he has to go through and thanks to his personal notes about your mission objectives, you can get a fairly good idea of his personality. Other characters in the game are memorable, the voice-acting is clear, understandable and overall swell.
Through most of the game, you will be forced to wander through thin and dark corridors, all on your own. With atmospheric music building up tension and then a scary alien jumping out of nowhere. Just to top that off, you will sometimes hear tapping, roars, scratching and in one chapter, you even hear distant singing. This makes the whole experience even creepier. This is one of the many things I love about this scary game. While you are on your first playthrough, you will actually NEVER feel safe. This is something that this game excels at, giving you that weird feeling that you are all alone out here and nobody is coming to help you (just a little note: this game is best played late at night with no lights on and volume turned up to loud).
Through the first long part of Dead Space and most of the game later on as well, you will only encounter a few enemies at once. Some will jump out of nowhere, some will feast on a corpse and others will play dead until you come close enough for them to have a good chance of killing you in one hit. Dismembering your enemies' limbs saves you ammo and slows them down. Sometimes a Necromorph will jump on you and you will have to press X repeatedly, as fast as you can to get it off you. If it's a smaller enemy, Isaac will sometimes throw it on the ground and kick it full force, splattering it's blood all over the place.
There are many types of Necromorphs, but all of them are creepy in some way. Whether it's a walking mutated corpse, a foetus with tentacles, a deformed body with no legs and, well, something really disgusting but you'll find out for yourself once you play Dead Space. On top that, your enemies usually move very quickly and sometimes you have to fight them in complete darkness. Necrmorphs also make very weird sounds, so when you first hear one coming for you, you will be scared to death.
The story is split into 12 chapters, enemies will get harder as you go and environments will get bloodier and sicker as well. Most of the game is played in nearly complete darkness, the game aims at building up tension then scaring you when something jumps out. In some chapters, Dead Space picks up pace and the game changes into escaping from a hell of a lot of enemies chasing after you. Sometimes these changes feel way too sudden and you aren't prepared for them at all but it's good that the game keeps things fresh and gives you a thrill before going back into wandering the darkness so it doesn't drag on too much.
Dead Space can be very challenging at the beginning, enemies will kill you easily and whenever you want to save your progress, you have to reach the next save station... and you'd expect these places to be reasonably safe? Well some of them aren't safe at all but thankfully, most of them are. Sometimes you will have to go into a vacuum and keep an eye on how much oxygen you have left, sometimes you will go into Zero-Gravity environments where you can jump from surface to surface but also expect enemies to do the same.
The one thing that makes the game a bit easier is the ability to upgrade your equipment. Most of your weapons are tools but they can be upgraded to a much more powerful state. Same goes for your suit. Upgrading your suit can increase the amount of oxygen storage and your hit points. Every time you upgrade something, you use up a power node. Power nodes can be found throughout the ship and they can also be bought at the store but they are expensive.
At the store, you can unlock new items, weapons, ammo types and suit armour upgrades as you progress through the story and collect schematics. You can also sell things for credits. Credits are sometimes dropped by dead enemies. Every time you buy a suit armour upgrade, Isaac's suit appearance changes from cool to ultra cool. Workbenches (where you upgrade your stuff), the store and save stations are the only things you can trust... and they're not even people.
While you make your way through the dark depths of the USG Ishimura, you will find half-eaten corpses, blood (a lot of it), aliens, body parts, creepy stuff written on walls and audio/text logs which were written/recorded by various crew members of the ship before you got here. These logs help to uncover more of the story and help you to figure what is going as well. However if you don't want to look for them, you don't have to.
When it comes to the visuals of Dead Space, you gotta say "wow!" because all textures are high-resolution and all characters (especially Isaac) are well animated. For example, as Isaac gets injured, he might start limping etc. And the environments are creepy as hell. Adding to that, the game works with nearly no lag at all and a great frame-rate. It just runs so smoothly, it's astonishing.
Unfortunately, the game isn't very innovative at all when it comes to gameplay. Many gameplay elements have been pretty much ripped-off of Resident Evil 4. Dead space uses these elements extremely well, but it still makes me kinda angry that EA couldn't think of something new because this game has so much potential and it could have brought so many new things to the genre of Survival Horror games.
There is one new thing though, and that's no HUD (Heads Up Display). Everything you need to know is ether displayed on the back of Isaac's suit or in front of you, by holograms. There is an inventory, a database where you can view or play found logs, a journal with your mission objectives and a map of the current location. But that's all displayed in holograms in front of you, in real time and it doesn't stop the game. However, you can pause the game by pressing START, but all you can do from there is quit the game, resume or access options.
I loved Dead Space, it scared the hell out of me on my first playthrough. I think the atmosphere of it is just amazing and how it can build up tension and then give you a real fright. Sometimes it feels like wandering around the corridors drags on too much but as soon as it starts to do so, the game suddenly picks up pace and pretty much gives you a kick in the face... which isn't really that much of a good thing because it's too sudden but it keeps the gameplay fresh. Dead Space gets more difficult as you go, but eventually, when you have most of your stuff fully upgraded, you will feel like this ultimate badass who can take on anything and any time. The game really has great visuals but only a few stunning environments. The story of Dead Space is okay, but it isn't very original and neither are some of the gameplay elements. You have no HUD in the game which gives you a much more cinematic experience than most other games. However lack of originality in story and especially gameplay, as well as simple objectives stop Dead Space from reaching its full potential. Other than that and some minor annoyances, everything works well and just like it should. Dead Space is a great Horror video game.