From under the radar comes one of the best games ever made.
-Graphics
-Sound design
-Lighting effects
-Seamless gameplay
-Level design
-Replay value
Many other features in Dead Space are close to the top as well, like voice acting and story, but the previous list, let me emphasize again, are the best I have seen in a game. Ever.
No gamer who rents or buys this game will, at any point during playing it have a feeling that they got burned by poor design or programming. Everything works flawlessly from object interaction to character control.
The plot for Dead Space is really nothing new. You are a space engineer called to repair a ship, and upon arrival discover something gone terribly wrong. Naturally, you end up stuck on the ship trying to figure out how to escape the nasties inhabiting it. Bioshock or the movie Alien should be coming to mind here, so like I said, nothing new. But the plot's presentation, not its originality is the hook (not to mention, it puts a fantastic story to this rehearsed template anyway.) The premise of the game offers an environment upon which the most creative aspects of this game thrive.
The gameplay is really a combination of things you have never seen in a game, and things you have seen before, done the best they have ever been done. One of my favorite mechanics in this game is when your character leaves a gravity-induced room of the ship into an antigravity room, or a brief venture into space where the 2D floor is no longer your only path, and you can jump freely from floor to wall to ceiling, and must do so to solve one of many creative puzzles. And the puzzles themselves are always new, and make great employment out of your powers that you pick up along the way to temporarily slow an object, or to kinetically control an inanimate item like Syndrome in The Incredibles. Every moment where this ability is called upon feels new (not like moving blocks in Tomb Raider for the last 10 years), and each situation comes naturally like "Hmm I could cross here if only I could pull that tram hanging above the void over to me somehow... OH I CAN!" Moments like this make you immersed in a game world that is so real, not like another trite puzzle popped up and you were expecting it.
Like a true survival horror, you will cherish ammo and health packs in this game. You are able to upgrade your armor or guns at stores spread throughout, but money found only goes so far, and you find yourself using it more often on ammo than upgrades. Enemies must be killed with precision by dismembering them, or else you will waste more ammo on them than they will ever drop, but on medium setting the ammo shortage feels just right, and makes you work hard to survive. But here is where the beauty of complete replay value comes in. After beating the game, it unlocks new armor, and gives you a load of money for a second play through, making your second round feel like a run 'n' gun action game rather than survival horror. It genuinely feels like an entirely new, and very fun game, not to mention that the intriguing plot revealed in this game makes you want to play it again to understand the beginning with the knowledge gained at the end.
One more thing has to be mentioned, and that is the remarkable player immersion in this game. First of all, the sound design here is epic, and is one of the key elements in my opinion for making a game feel real. Second, you could play through it, go to save screens, watch videos that you find, open menus to sort your items, and you will never feel like your character wasn't standing right there. That is because your character uses glowing projected HUD's for all of these things. If you watch a video log, your character projects it in front of him, never leaving the actual game. You can move about, open doors, search for objects, and it will just follow you and play until it is over or until you stop it. You can even rotate the camera around it and it will skew appropriately, or you can watch it backwards if you like. But, you will NEVER leave the actual game with these things, making you feel like you are truly inside this forbidden ship.
I am beyond impressed with Dead Space. I remember being so disappointed with Bioshock's gameplay, but Dead Space has delivered all of the horror, all of the brilliant plot, all of the creative/beautiful/immense/detailed environment of Bioshock and followed it up with creativity and functionality unmatched by almost any game. You have to look very hard to notice any flaws in this masterpiece, and as for me, after a 10 hour completion of this satisfying game, I just wanted more.