It was said in space no one can hear you scream. Dead space theorizes that in space demons can make you scream... loudly
I got it for my XBOX-360 and to date its one of the best in my 360 collection. Being that I only barely have a top 3 for it, to me thats saying something.
The acting is well done for a horror game, especially when I think about the first one I played, RE1, and how bad the acting was in that. In RE1 the B rated campiness was one of the draws to play it. If your like me you know what I mean, theres something morbidly enjoyable about bad acting in a world that could never exist. This game however used another approach, it attempted to make you understand only enough and not focus on things it wanted to surprise you with later. The acting was solid enough for a movie really and helps to set the pacing. Biggets problem was they would tell you something more then once in text and voice several times throughout the game. I quite often would find a text that told me something and minutes or sometimes next game session id find something in voice that tells me almost the exact same thing.
I'm not going to give away spoilers, but I did really enjoy the story in this game and thought it was well paced.
The battles, once you get used to how you HAVE to fight in this game, are actually really easy. Ive never actually played this game with anything more then the plasma cutter, dont see the point and im on my second run through, but that doesnt take away from the game for me. If you WANT to use another weapon you can, and they have a good selection and from what I hear some are more overpowered then others. The only down side to this is it begs the question when thinking of a game which should be intended to play once and have replayability (which this game does but not for weapon reasons) why would you make really the only necessary weapon the first one you get?
That being said though, this game is more forgiving then RE and while it is very easy to run out of ammo when you first play and start to get used to the way this game works as long as your paying attention you never actually have a problem with ammo and biggest problem you may end up having at some point is running out of inventory space.
I actually had not heard of the holo HUD that this game utilizes before I played it and to me its one of the best features this game brought to the table. Not only does it keep you immersed in the games world, but it doesnt hamper you in times of crisis. It will never be easy to open an inventory in combat in a survival horror and use health, and it shouldnt, but at least this game doesnt make it pointless.
The graphics are beautiful as many others have said. I loved looking out the windows in some of the rooms, it really felt like their was a planet down there, or space debris coming at the ship.
The sounds are superb in this, although the music is drab at times I really enjoyed actually how everything was so well thought out. From the dissipated noise of your screams in vacuum of space, to the boom of the plasma cutter, or the nasty smashing sound when you stomp on something pointlessly because your afraid it will get up again.
Just gonna finish this up with some down sides to this game. The combat is very easy once you get used to it, although in the case of this game it paced well enough to where it didnt get to easy as it kept introducing harder enemies to fight. The problem here was the harder enemies are merely darker skinned and in total you honestly only fight 4 or so different enemies. Its not bad, and in the context of this game it certainly fits the story, but variety is the spice of life.
There are times when your running around and theres nothing anywhere, often because your backtracking. The ambience is very good but after awhile it gets a tad tedious at a few points in the game.
Theres a couple points in the game where you talk to people, you are forced to wait in a room (almost always with a bullet proof glass between you and them) and listen to someone tell you to do something or whatever but it made it feel forced because your character doesnt talk. He just listens and obeys.
This is another game that is using the System Shock archetype of story progression. Its been used 3 times (2 times in the past couple years) now. Its a good story progression but its getting overplayed. While I like these types of stories, I'd prefer them to not keep the hero so silent especially in games like this where we really need to care about the person we're playing and feel his sense of need. It didnt play right because we didnt hear him say anything about anything. Only heard what other people say about it. Strangely they act as if he'd talked about it before but for some reason today hes gone mute. That really really bugs me.
As you can tell I only have a few bad things to say about the game, and the worst of it is story related. Im trying to not be a fan boy and just look at this from both sides here. If you like gorey horror games I suggest you play this, it really is fun despite it being fairly easy (Ive played this on all difficulty levels except easy) the story is decently engaging allbeit falls flat from a mute protagonist, but the atmosphere, acting, and pacing helps keeps the story going well enough to make it interesting. On top of that the innovations here and the upgrade systems make it a game that is replayable if only to see the game after you've upgraded to max.
So thats why I gave it an 8.5 out of 10. Not a bad game at all, as a matter of fact- way way better then alone in the dark(remake) and in my humble opinoin current runnings of RE. Definitely worth checking out, but if your kid wants it you may want to see if its to graphic in your opinoin for them as it is one of the goriest games ive played (probably up there next to SH, id say its worse actually in the gore).