Dead Space Preview

Dead Space is a bit like Resident Evil, FEAR and BioShock all rolled into one.

Speaking of BioShock, Dead Space certainly rekindles memories of how that game feels to play. I'm talking about the isolation, the darkness, the weirdness, the adrenaline-pumping music and the feeling of claustrophobia. From what we've seen of the game, EA's doing a great job of making you feel very alone in space. There's ominous music, alien screeching, blood-splattered corridors and more flickering lights than a Saturday night rave. Picture the scene in Aliens where the marines land on the planet and begin their search of the colony. It's like that, except without the marines.

You won't see any mini-guns, shotguns or pistols in Dead Space either. As we mentioned, Isaac's an engineer, so only has engineering tools to play around with. The game's first weapon, the Plasma Cutter, fires out a slice of bone cleaving plasma along the line of blue lasers which act as a sort of targeting reticule. Each weapon in the game has an alternate fire mode. For the Plasma Cutter, it switches the orientation of the plasma cutter from horizontal to vertical. Why? Good question.

The answer lies in what EA calls Strategic Dismemberment, which is a bit of a mouthful. All the aliens in the game, and Isaac himself, have been designed from the ground up to facilitate the removal of their limbs. So, with the Plasma Cutter set to default, that is, horizontal fire, you'll be aiming for alien legs or their heads for blood splattering decapitation. Switch to vertical, and you'll be able to slice off their arms, with typically gruesome blood sprays ala Kill Bill. Lovely.

At first the Plasma Cutter feels a little unresponsive. You need to aim by holding the left trigger and fire with the right. When aiming Isaac moves incredibly slowly (you can sprint with the left bumber, but not while raising your weapon), so for the most part you'll have it lowered. When you get jumped or rushed by a swarm of aliens it can be hard to quickly fire off accurate plasma pulses. There's no one-hit-kill either - each alien feels like it requires some serious work to kill. We suspect that the more you play the game the better you'll get with the weapon, but during our play test the combat did feel a tad clunky.

Expect lots of gore. Lots and lots of gore.

You'll spend lots of time using melee attacks too, since ammo will be scare throughout the game. Here, a simple press of the right trigger will make Isaac swing his currently equipped weapon. As a general rule, the bigger it is, the more damage it will do, but the slower the attack will be. Aim down and melee and you'll trigger the super violent curb stomp move, perfect for dispatching crawling aliens, anything you suspect of playing dead and, ahem, the odd baby zombie. If aliens do get close, in true Resident Evil style they will latch on to Isaac and start sticking their claws into his back and gnaw on his throat. Here, you need to hammer the A button to shake them off and trigger an instant melee attack. This is different depending on what enemy it is. We saw a few, all extremely gory, including one where Isaac tore an alien head right off its body. Lovely.

Other playable weapons include the slow-firing but powerful Line Gun, the quick-fire Pulse Rifle and a weapon which hasn't been named yet (the team did have a name, but thought it was rubbish so scrapped it). It features a spinning blade that can be projected forward along the line of a beam, held there while it cuts up aliens, then brought back to the gun. Sweet.

The weapons, especially the Plasma Cutter, do feel fresh. The ability to change the orientation of the plasma blast so that you can control what limbs you are sawing off (go for the legs so they hit the deck, the arms so they can't cut you) feels cool and looks cool. What doesn't feel fresh is the ability every weapon has to pick up objects and chuck them about, called the TK Gun. Ring any bells?

It's a complete rip-off of Half Life 2's Gravity Gun of course. It won't win any awards for originality, but there are some useful and cool sounding applications of it. Say, for example, you're low on ammo and are down to one Plasma Cutter burst. You're jumped by an alien and have some distance between you and it. You switch the Plasma Cutter to vertical orientation, fire and slice its razor-sharp claw arm right off, use the TK Gun to drag the arm to you, then fire it off at the alien, dismembering it. Sounds nice.