Great game for anyone who considers them selves a gamer.
From the minute I sat down and started to play Dead Space I knew it was a game for me. It's the closest to perfection a survival horror game has come to since Silent Hill 2 or Resident Evil 2.
The good things about this game are not limited by any means. I'll start with the all new combat system. This combat system is designed around quartering the various monsters that you encounter with futuristic mining tools ranging from a kinesis buzz saw to a flame thrower to a gun that shoots a line of plasma a yard wide (called the "Line Gun" and my personal favorite). You are also given two modules to help with puzzles and combat. The first one you are given is Stasis. Stasis gives you the power to slowdown objects such as malfunctioning doors, over-sized brutish monsters with over sized novelty ribbon-cutting-ceremony scissors for arms, and other various uses for puzzles. The other module you get is a kinesis module which allows you to mimic telekinesis. You know like bending spoons, throwing conveniently placed cylindrical tubes full of a random exploding agent at a group of over-sized brutish monsters with over sized novelty ribbon-cutting-ceremony scissors for arms, and other various uses for puzzles. The game implements subtle RPG elements by allowing you to buy new suits that give you more armor and inventory slots, enemies drop loot, and you are allowed to upgrade your armor, guns, and modules with "Power Nodes" that you collect throughout the game. You can add capacity, damage, reload speed, firing speed, and secondary fires on you weapons. Your can get extra air, and health from your suit. Lastly you can get more distance and duration for your modules.
The next thing is the story line. The story line is probably the weakest part of the good parts of this game but it is still pretty good and I don't like to ruin it for people so I won't tell you any thing except that your name starts with an "I".
The puzzles in this game are actually pretty good in fact there are some really really good ones. None like the **** they gave me in Resident Evil 4.
Not to say I didn't like Resident Evil 4 but the series ditched it's clever puzzles for ****ty puzzles, and there is no valid excuse why the puzzles should have sucked that much. Unless Capcom asked one of their personal elite assassins to kill the guy who made the puzzles difficult yet intuitive and fun and mentally stimulating. Alas we were left with a game that was as mentally stimulating as a package of Double Stuff Oreos. *Deep Breath* sorry about that I got carried away any who where was I? Oh yeah puzzles.. yah they are good.
And last good stuff that I'd like to comment on is what really makes this game. This last section is something that I find a lot of people miss or rather a collection of things that people tend to miss and I find that other game reviewers don't give enough credit to. Those things are as follows; Intuitive game play, music / sound effects, Atmosphere, Story Pacing, controls, camera angles, learning curves, and probably most importantly Immersion. Dead Space has mastered all of the above categories and stands out in Intuitive game play. Maybe some people don't understand what that is, allow me to explain. Intuitive game play means when you pick up the controller to play you just kinda know what to do with out needing a tutorial. With Dead Space all of the controls are as close to perfect as I've ever seen although I have one complaint about the controls. In al,l if not most survival horror games that I've played, you have a button or button combination that turns you 180 degrees to make running from monsters, or just plain tuning around, a lot easier and I find this important because a third person survival horror needs you to move slow and that means that you're gonna turn around slow and probably be killed for it. I died on more than one occasion where if I had this magic button I could have survived. Other than that the atmosphere will most definitely make you execrate some sort of waste by-product on to your couch or chair but certainly you'll have to change your boxer-briefs unless you free ball in which case more power to you.
Graphics are good.
The bad things about Dead Space is well... they were kinda hard to find. Although there are a few. One is glaring the others note so much.
The biggest problem is the mission objectives. They are insanely repetitive and the ones that didn't repeat them selves are ridiculously hard. In one mission you have to go to a laser turret and shoot asteroids so that the ship doesn't explode because that would be anticlimactic. And well it's REALLY HARD like holy **** It took me 5 or 6 tries to survive only by the skin of my teeth and I don't think I could have done any better than ending with one health left seriously the only way it could have been harder is if you had a bag tied over your head and you were at the bottom of the Mariana trench. If something is that insanely frustrating then don't put it in your game cuz that's just gonna piss off the players. Perhaps the same objective but with a different less insanely difficult. The worst part about this is that it appears again but only this time you have 10 more health and now you're fighting a giant monster thats on the outside of the ship.
Which leads me to my other problem with the game. The boss fights are all the same and incredibly linear and there is only 3 of them. All of the bosses have clearly visible bulbs that explode and that's pretty much all that it takes to kill all of the bosses. I guess it kinda makes sense because you are suppose to take off every things limbs to kill it... except the last boss of course.
Lastly there is something that I don't know if I like or not. If you press the right analog stick down you get a line that shows you where to go and that makes the game really linear however it is easily explained by the "It's the future" argument I mean you even have a 3d interactive map. But this device keeps people from getting stuck and needing to think about where to find things and it's something I particularly enjoyed from the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series. It didn't make the game bad or unemployable and at times when you are given a choice on which direction it didn't really punish you for not following the line but you did lose the luxury of having a line showing you where exactly to go. I haven't played through on hard or "Insane" yet maybe they get rid of that on higher difficulty levels. Perhaps they are catering to the aforementioned "Frat Boy" Gamers.
One minor thing is that the game played through the first time only took me 12 hours ish. But that being said it's a game that you can rent and beat so you don't have to waste 60 bucks on it I how ever will be playing the game through a few more times I'm sure.
Last comments: Something that I was curious about as I neared the end of the game is will I get all of my upgrades going into the second time through the game, and the answer was yes. Unfortunately I could only keep it if I went through it on the medium difficulty setting again and I want more of a challenge. Something like this will never make or break a game so it is neither good nor bad.
In conclusion Dead Space is a must play game for any one that really considers them selves a gamer. It's pants wetting, intuitive, mentally stimulating, innovative, action packed and most importantly it's game immersion at it's finest.