Systems: PS3 (reviewed), XBox 360, PC

Publisher: EA

Rating: M, and they mean it

System reviewed on: Damon's Palladium System

Love them or hate them, Electronic Arts produces a lot of games. Let's face it, most of their games feel like they produce a lot of games. What's the allure of each successive Madden title? For that matter, what's the allure of working for a company that sucks the very life out of you and produces a lot of mediocre, safe, cookie-cutter titles. EA promised from the start that Dead Space would be different. Boy, is it ever...

Created using EA's new cross platform engine, Dead Space is a horror survival game set far in mankind's future. We have presumably ran out of Earth to strip mine and the Concordance Mining Company is in the habit of doing something called Planet Cracking - finding a backwater planet and tearing it apart bit by bit using huge ships and teams of miners. While cracking a planet, the crew of the Ishimura find something that some believe to be an alien relic, and possibly even something called a "marker". While the meaning is not very clear as you start the game, the idea of A Marker clearly has some kind of religious significance.

You are Issac, an engineer accompanying two other humans on a mission to repair the Ishimura, which we initially assume has merely got some communications issues. Once on board, you find out something has gone terribly wrong. You can't find any of the crew. What you can find are a lot of terrifying creatures who want to kill you. To say much more would be spoiling the story for you, and the story is worth not spoiling.

The controls took some getting used to, but once you master them they feel fairly natural. You control Isaac in an over-the-sholder view not quite like a first person shooter. This allows for one of the games extremely cool yet subtle features. There is no HUD. Your health meter is some kind of tube on Isaac's back, as are the other gauges you'll need to watch. In fact, all of the gameplay menus are crafted in such a way as to feel more like a part of the game. Your inventory is held in your suit, and is visible via a hologram projected in front of your head. When accessing menus, you can and will be attacked. The action does not stop. Your ammo is a hologram projected from the back of the weapons.

Speaking of weapons, you are an engineer, not a combat marine. The weapons you'll find were not meant for killing things, human or otherwise. You have to dispatch the bad guys with high tech mining equipment - plasma rock cutters, high tech saws and other similar items. Combined with the fact that the game encourages, no requires, you to sever the limbs of the strange Necormorphs you'll encounter and you're watching something Eli Roth would be jealous of.

The colors are dark, for obvious reasons, but EA's new engine looks good, at least on par with Call of Duty 4. The textures, such as Isaac's suite, are very detailed and really help with the illusion that the world of the Ishimura is real. The weapon effects are eerie and appropriate. The Necromorphs are visceral and sometimes terrible to look at.

After a few hours in the game, I feel like I'm playing through a movie like Aliens. The sound quality seems very good to me, and the game's use of my surround sound system is to be commended. Sure, there are plenty of "jump" moments to get a cheap scare out of you but the game goes way beyond this. Once you've encountered a few bad guys you'll recognize some intense "fight" music. However, sometimes the game will start playing this music and nothing happens. Picture hearing the "Jaws" music only to learn there was no shark in the water this time; you feel the negative effects of the adrenaline hangover without the satisfaction of blood and severed limbs to go with it. The bad guys often travel through the ventilation system; there is one particularly un-nerving section of the game where you can plainly hear that you are being stalked by something above or to one side of you but you'll have to put up with what seems like an eternity of enervation before coming face to face...

- Fantastic