Dead Space (PC)

Dead Space could well be this year's must own survival horror title

"In space the stars are no nearer / they just glitter like a morgue / And I dreamed I was a spaceman / burned like a moth in a flame / And our world was so ****ing gone."

The happy-go-lucky words of Marilyn Manson, folks. While it's a tad unlikely that Mazza was thinking about video games when he wrote them, these lyrics somehow remind us of our time with Dead Space, prowling the blood-spattered corridors of the USG Ishimura. There's something extremely lonely about being trapped aboard a space ship with a small army of razor-clawed aliens, but it's important to keep your mind focused and your finger on the trigger. Feeling sorry for yourself will get you nowhere - and besides, it's kinda hard to give yourself a hug when something just tore off both your arms.

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If you've read our previous coverage of Dead Space then you'll be familiar with what this game's all about. It's a third-person survival horror, set aboard an enormous spacecraft that gathers resources by sucking out the insides of planets, like a toddler with a Cadbury's Creme Egg. As fate would have it, the Ishimura's latest Creme Egg contained something rather unpleasant - and now all lines of communication have fallen ominously silent. You'll step into the boots of Isaac Clarke, an engineer who forms part of a small team sent out to fix the ship's relays. Needless to say, you soon find yourself in seriously deep doo-doo, squaring up to a hideous alien race known as the Necromorphs. Last week EA kindly gave us several hours to explore the opening parts of the game, a generous session that allowed us to get a hands-on - or should that be a hands-off? - experience of Dead Space's tense, limb-severing gameplay.

After a short intro that sets up your team's rather hasty landing on the Ishimura, you'll find yourself standing in the cockpit of your shuttle. It may take you a moment to realise that the game has started, because there's absolutely no form of head-up display. Once you do get to grips with the fact that you're now in control, your initial reaction may be one of confusion: while the perspective from which you view the action is not entirely dissimilar to the one used in Resident Evil 4, Isaac himself appears to take up a huge chunk of the screen. Perhaps we've just been conditioned by years of playing games from a more conventional viewpoint, but at first we feared that it could scupper proceedings entirely... and yet bizarrely, after about 15 minutes or so we adjusted to it completely. Being so close to Isaac doesn't restrict your view much, but it does create a slightly claustrophobic feeling that really gets under your skin; it encourages you to look around a lot, to keep an eye out for dangers. This combination of tight perspective and a clutter-free screen sucked us into the Dead Space world very quickly - which was no mean feat given that we were playing alongside dozens of other journalists.

At times the game looks stunning

Within moments of leaving the safety of your own ship, you'll find yourself separated from your friends and under attack from the parasitic Necromorphs - aliens who seem to have mutated the Ishimura's crew into tentacled, razor-clawed monstrosities. As you're probably aware, Dead Space's 'special ingredient' is a focus on dismemberment: shooting aliens in the head won't get you anywhere; you'll have to take them apart, piece-by-piece. Your first battles will introduce you to the Plasma Cutter, a pistol-like weapon that fires three bolts simultaneously in either a vertical or horizontal line. We found that the former worked well for lopping off arms, while the latter did a good job of taking out legs.

In either case, your mutilated enemies will adjust their movements and attacks based around whatever limbs they've got left; these things want to kill you, dammit - and they'll keep on trying even if it means crawling. At the start of the game your cutter only holds 10 rounds to a clip, and given that even the early Necromorphs take a fair bit of punishment, it's easy to hit empty during a fight - forcing you to rely on melee swipes and stomps. One nice touch is that your targeting beam changes colour as your ammo depletes; you'll get a sinking feeling in the stomach as the ray turns red while a pair of screeching nasties close in on your position.

you'll hammer away at the Necromorphs with the butt of your cutter, pounding their corpses long after you've ended their worthless existence.

Many survival games give you plenty of health but hold back on ammunition; Dead Space seems to take the opposite approach - we nearly always had a couple of clips in our back pocket, but poor Isaac himself was often a bit worse for wear. This means that you'll always be more than happy to lay into your attackers, but you'll be pretty concerned about them getting to you. For most of the first chapter you'll rarely face more than two Necros at a time. During this first period, you'll also be allowed plenty of chances to use your stasis device, which can freeze enemies and grant you a bullet time-style advantage. However, this gentle treatment doesn't last long. From the second chapter onwards, you'll routinely find yourself dealing with three or more opponents - and because they have the ability to climb into the Ishimura's air duct system, you'll never know where they might pop up. Battles will frequently end with you depleting your stasis charge and emptying your clip just as you've been backed into a corner: you'll hammer away at the Necromorphs with the butt of your cutter, pounding their corpses long after you've ended their worthless existence. Then you'll be left in the dark, surrounded by gore and blown off limbs, listening to the wet gasps of your critically injured engineer.

Each chapter of Dead Space is structured around clear goals and locations. In the opening stage you'll be working to fix the Ishimura's internal tram system ("Good morning Dr Freeman!") while in the second you'll be scouring the medical bay for bomb components so you can blow your way into the morgue (because a morgue is clearly the best place to go to in the middle of a horror scenario). As we've mentioned, there's no immediate HUD in normal play, but at the touch of a button you can summon a set of management screens, which are digitally projected in front of your character. This looks awesome, but it's worth bearing in mind that the game carries on while you do this - so it might not be a good idea to look at the map if something slimy is trying to munch on your flesh.

On top of the video display, there's a slightly controversial tool that we came to refer to as The Donnie Darko button (the game gives it the slightly cuter title of "Breadcrumbs"). If you've seen Richard Kelly's cult sci-fi film, you'll remember a bit where the characters all had strange lines flowing out of them, showing where they were about to go. Well, in Dead Space there's a navigation system that will do pretty much the same thing - turning Isaac to face in the right direction and displaying a flashing blue line to show exactly where you need to go. At first, this concerned us - it seemed a little too close to the arrows on the floor in Perfect Dark Zero. However, we quickly reasoned that this indicator actually made sense in terms of the game's story. Isaac is an engineer: he has a map of the ship and he knows where he needs to go, so why wouldn't he have a device like this? More importantly, it doesn't affect the atmosphere. After all, it's not where you need to go that should be concerning you; it's what's going to be there when you arrive.

A hideous beast might be waiting for you around a corner

Our only real concern about the level structure, from what we've seen so far, is that the first few chapters of Dead Space are quite linear. Goals must be accomplished in a direct order, and the use of the Darko button only underlines this fact. To be fair, by midway through the third chapter - which sees you rebooting the ship's engines - the environments seemed to be getting more complicated, with several objectives that needed to be completed; it's quite possible that the later chapters will broaden in scope to allow a greater degree of exploration. Even if this isn't the case, there's plenty to enjoy about the murderous path you'll head down. Alongside the bursts of fraught combat (and the occasional physics-based puzzle), we can confirm that the first four hours of Dead Space are littered with some great "oh shit" moments. It'd be mean to spoil any of the nastier surprises, but we particularly liked our encounter with the ship's captain - who was surprisingly active, despite being dead. There's also a wonderful moment involving the use of zero gravity in an enormous, cavern-like room. Here you'll have to aim at the surface you wish to leap to; at the touch of a button you'll rocket across, the camera wooshing around as what was once the ceiling becomes the ground beneath your feet.

So, is it scary? We didn't experience the game in the quietest conditions, but even so it was clear that Dead Space will be a pretty intense ride. The art design borrows most heavily from The Thing and the original Alien, while the use of audio clips is pure System Shock 2 - but the game still feels like its own entity, rather than a pastiche of other influences. While there will always be a certain amount of common ground in survival horror titles, the dismemberment system adds a fresh take on things and lends the combat a neat strategic edge; it also helps conjure the sense that the creatures you're fighting are genuinely of another world, which is never a bad thing.

We were really quite impressed with Dead Space, and we're certainly keen to see how the rest of it will play out. If the other chapters can match and expand upon the quality of the opening levels, then EA could have a monster hit on their hand. At the moment, the game is still like some kind of alien egg lodged deep within John Hurt's guts; the noises he's making indicate that something evil is growing down there, but we're very much looking forward to October 24, when the beast finally rips through his chest, and squelches out onto shop shelves.

Dead Space is due out for Xbox 360 and PS3 on October 24, with a PC version due out on October 31.