Chops awaaaayyy!!
Alongside Isaac Clarke - his laboured breathing, occasional grunts and roars of desperate rage - and his wonderful RIG suit, it's the things he has to fight, the necromorph monsters, that steal the show. And the point of difference here is that to make a quick, effective kill, you've got to chop their limbs off. Headshots don't do the job; you'll just be wasting a lot of precious ammo pummelling the face of some horrific beast-thing while it works itself into a kill-crazy frenzy, then comes at you in a rage. You'll find yourself being gruesomely disembowelled whilst clicking away on an empty magazine swearing to God you'll be good for the rest of your life. Shoot their arms off, their legs, their tentacles or anything that sprouts from their twisted, bony/ fleshy mass and pray that you've got enough ammo to kill the hundred others that'll come pouring out of the vents and grilles surrounding you. I have to say that the monsters are astonishing. Right from your first encounter with a couple of them in a tight, claustrophobic corridor, you're running scared. They move quickly, some move incredibly quickly. The big ones rip you to shreds while others explode to release masses of horrible, squirmy crawling things - so be careful how you handle those. Don't shoot the bellies off the pregnant ones. There's a particularly gruesome type of squirming thing that wants to remove your head and replace it with one of its own. There's a thing that you can't kill which you've just got to run from while it roars and bellows and pounds after you. There's a thing that drags a heavy, exploding .... something .... with it (so don't let it get too close because it doesn't half make a bang!) and there's a vicious tentacle the size of the Channel Tunnel that often finds its way into the ship and whips you off you feet to drag you screaming and gasping towards a gruesome fate.
From the off, the necromorph are difficult to kill because your weapons are pretty weak. They don't care about that, they just want to kill you. So find their weak-spots. Pick one weapon that works for you and make sure that's the one that's upgraded first and foremost. For me it was the plasma cutter. There's nothing you can't kill with the plasma cutter (apart from, obviously, the 'thing you can't kill').
In the later levels they come at you in wave after wave, plenty of them in all varieties - stronger, faster, totally relentless and not giving a flying f**** that you're virtually out of ammo and the only thing you can do is try and beat them off with some wild and desperate swings from your metal. And boy, something about this game makes you just want to kill them; you hate them, you despise them, you just want them out of your face. You want them reduced to a pile of mess that you can stomp or kick around because they've brought you to this, they've made you this killer.
Ahem.... and I'm a nice guy.
Set-design, lighting and music. All great. I mean I couldn't fault them. The environments physically add to the game, they don't just frame it. The environment affects how you tackle that part of the game, because it may be there's no oxgygen, or there's no gravity. It may be that the lights have gone out and all you've got is the muzzle-flash from your pulse-rifle to show where the monsters are coming from. It's that intense. You've got to negotiate terrifying runs and zero-G jumps across the outer hull of the ship, and there's a truly heart-stopping battle in a giant pipe near the end the game which is so tense, and so involving, you really feel like you're there. There are isolated rooms which are suddenly locked down while a computerised voice calmly announces she's put it into quarantine: the vents open and the monsters come screaming at you and you know there's no way out until every last one of them is reduced to squirming tripe on the sole of your boots. One particular highlight for me was a disorienting, simply gigantic chamber, littered with asteroid chunks which you've got to fire into space - and all I can say about that is, watch out when the gravity comes back on.
Tension builds. The pace ratchets up and at the end of it....... you really really need that sigh of relief........ enjoy it, because the relief doesn't last that long.
Great game.
Buy it.