Definitely nothing like the first game. Instead series went into a CoD direction.
Story/plot: The story here is just complete garbage as the mystery of the markers unfolds further in dead space 3. The more it progressed, the more bitter I felt about the whole thing, until the very disappointing end. I did two playthroughs, one entirely solo and one entirely co-op. I can tell you that both times I didn't feel any sense of dread, fear, anxiety or anything of that nature, it was just a space shooter from beginning to end and the story is god awful as you become thrown into a love triangle while an annoying villain that tries way too hard at being an annoying villain, seems way overly forced on you and the plot. To put it bluntly, it was just pointless.
Mechanics/tech: The graphics are decent and the sound is decent, despite the insane amount of game-breaking bugs and issues. The new weapon crafting is somewhat of a nice feature but honestly it feels like a pointless contribution to the game because the game is just too damn easy, even on impossible mode, which is probably what normal mode should have been. You can deploy scavenger bots that run out and bring you back stuff for crafting but they bring back so many resources that you just end up with huge amounts of them due to the game being so damn easy and so many weapon options for crafting are just pointless versus other better options that there really isn't a large variety of useful things to craft in the end. You just use what works the best and that's pretty much all she wrote in terms of this crafting system lol, 80% useless functionality and didn't really bring anything at all to a dead space game. I'd rather have more customization for how my suit looks because the new suits in this game loot almost retro, they just weren't visually appealing to me at all.
I played dead space 1 again for like 10 minutes because I haven't played it in a very long time and during those 10 minutes I had a adrenaline rush and got startled more than once. I got more out of dead space 1 in just 10 minutes than I did out of the entire dead space 3 game from start to finish. It's no longer a horror game at all. Where are all the strange sounds? Where is all the whispering? Where are the shadows that move from something that is just out of sight? Meh, it's all missing from dead space 3. Dead space 1 is a completely different game than this even though they share the same franchise title.
I gave it a 5.5 score due to the story sucking badly, the suspense and thriller adrenaline rushes being nonexistent, and the game itself being way too easy. Co-op was just a bad feature for this game as well, good on paper but executed terribly here. More often than not you will feel so confined and constricted constantly running into your partner or waiting for them, then doing mind-numbingly easy puzzles and whatnot that it is a ridiculous contribution to the game as there's no real teamwork involved at all, and the game doesn't even change with 2 players over 1 when it comes down to it. It's the same exact thing, there's just a couple of co-op missions that the game does not allow you to access in single-player mode. They were so damned easy anybody could have solo'd them regardless. It's a straight up call of duty corridor shooter, but with dead space aliens. Nothing like Dead space 1 and the direction the story took was absolutely abysmal. Giving this game a 5.5 is generous in itself.