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When looking back on how a game played people find it hard not to draw comparisons to those before it. The truth is that in a lot of games you can see what it’s been influenced by. Whatever the genre there is always a long list of elements and ideas borrowed from the games predecessors. Dead Space isn’t a game that is exempt from the treatment.

Simply put Dead Space is a survival horror game in space. After you and a small crew land on a larger mining ship to give aid and mainly to find out what was going on, it obviously all goes horribly wrong. You start encountering necromorphs and soon crew members get picked off and before you know it your small crew is now even smaller and spilt up around different areas of the ship.

You play as engineer Issac Clarke who originally prepared for simply engineering mission to carry out a few repairs but soon finds himself up against a whole host of bizarre alien creatures. The truth is that you’ll still be carrying out repairs in various areas of the ship but you’ll also encounter different enemies and challenges on the way. Obviously your final goal is to get off the ship alive and this becomes an even more difficult task as quickly into the game the craft you came in on gets destroyed.

You can then use a various amount of engineering tools at your disposal to get rid of the weird alien creatures that infest the mining ship. There are also a whole host of different abilities for you to make use of. Kinetic powers are great at first but really become a key for numerous puzzles you’ll encounter. You can also use statis which will slow down enemies and obstacles you find along your way. The game does a good job of limiting your use of this power so it’s still fun the hundredth time you do it.

The enemies and story might be a bit generic but the space setting provides enough uniqueness that you’ll want to know where the story is going. Visually the ship looks brilliant and the menus are all in 3d real time so you never feel like you’ve been taken out of the game to access your inventory. All of Dead Space’s information is shown on small lights on the back of your suit and the way the game rids of a traditional heads up display makes you feel more involved with the action.

The way you actually down enemies is by cutting off limbs or heads. At least that’s the easiest way to go about it but this means that you’ll often be cringing at the gore. Dead Space is incredibly over the top and gory at times. If your not being eaten by giant tentacles the chances are your shooting limbs off a giant blob like thing. The thing is the game isn’t scary because of the gore actually it’s only really scary the first few times you get jumped at by a necromorph. Soon you’ll start to pick up on the different noises and music tracks that play before an encounter and it really voids the game of any tension it might have despite how cinematic the music actually sounds.

Throughout the game you’ll often venture into vacuumed areas and zero-gravity rooms. These allow you to jump from wall to wall to evade your foes which proves to be immense fun. It sounds terrific as well because everything sounds like it’s being covered up by something, giving you a decent impression of the nothingness in space. The real problem with these areas is simply there aren’t enough of them.

It’s also really easy to knock the game for it’s slow and bulky controls. You run very slow and walk even slower between areas and it’s even worse when you are in combat. You’ll often find yourself wildly swinging like a mad man at absolutely nothing because what was there earlier has moved across the room in the time it took you to complete the swing. It makes sense because Issac is wearing a bulky suit but that doesn’t save it because the bulky suit is a very interesting and puzzling design choice. It feels like it’s more of a way of slowing down the game and building up the tension instead of making a great experience even better.

Despite this the truth is that Deadspace actually comes off as being quite original. Sure the enemies look like they are from Doom 3, the premise is very similar to Bioshock’s and some of the visuals look like they’ve been taken out of Halo 3 but the truth is Dead Space is unique. Your not going to find another game like this for the time being and despite a few flaws this is one of the best survival horror games to come out in recent memory.