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Isaac has access to a stasis power, which he can use to freeze aliens.
Isaac has access to a stasis power, which he can use to freeze aliens.Isaac has access to a stasis power, which he can use to freeze aliens.

Apart from the strategic dismemberment, EA was keen to push how the development team has achieved super-realistic Zero Gravity in the game. We were able to experience this for ourselves, in a large room with loads of aliens and a simple physics-based puzzle. Once the Zero Gravity kicked in, Isaac was able to float towards any surface in the room, making it the floor beneath his feet and flipping the camera. It's extremely disorienting at first, but once you get used to it, the room does to a certain extent become a playground. As the aliens crawl on the floor, walls and ceilings, you're able to hunt them down wherever they go simply by floating towards them. And, if you manage to relieve an alien of its arm, for example, it will slowly float away, with blood following closely behind.

Once the aliens were cleared, we were able to eject the air in the room and create a vacuum, bringing to mind another classic scene from Aliens where Ripley tries to blast the Queen out of the airlock. Once the vacuum was created, the sound changed completely. You can hear Isaac breathing and grunting as he moves. You can hear his heart pounding as he runs from the aliens. You can here the muffled pulse of your Plasma Cutter and the groaning of metal as a large spinning structure swept the room. It really did feel like it might if, on the off chance, you were stuck in a zero gravity vacuum on board an alien infested space ship.

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Isaac also has access to a stasis power, which he can use to paralyse enemies. This uses up a commodity in the game, replenished at stations and from pick-ups, a bit like Eve from BioShock. We found that using stasis regularly was pretty much the only way to tackle multiple aliens rushing you at once, and was hard to aim too, due to the lack of a targeting reticule. But again, practise will no doubt make perfect.

Because of the way the game has been developed, the third chapter is pretty much finished, as are many of the gameplay mechanics, weapons and puzzles. EA is currently working on bringing up the game's other levels on a par with the third chapter. What this does is give us a good idea of how the third chapter will look when the game is released, despite it being early code. Right now, the game's graphics look brilliant, and every bit the triple-A title EA hopes it will be. There are some really cool ideas in there that sci-fi fans will enjoy thoroughly - there isn't really much on offer in the way of sci-fi survival horror at the moment. But there's a lot about Dead Space which is generic too.

Dead Space looks promising. We'll be keeping a close eye on this one.Dead Space looks promising. We'll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Take the aliens themselves. While it's great that the game's physics allows every limb to react realistically when cut off, the aliens look quite generic. The idea behind them is that they have infected the crew, harvested their bodies and turned them all into alien zombies, hence the alien babies and the fact that if you look closely you'll see human faces on the aliens with razor blade's growing out of their arms. One boss, which we weren't allowed to actually fight, looked like an oversized alien dog, something we've seen in countless games before. Another larger alien had a massive stomach which, if you sliced open, spilled out tiny spider-like aliens that crawled on the floor. Another large snake type alien latched on to Isaac's legs and dragged him to a hole in the wall of the ship from where it appeared. But it's the humanoid aliens which are most uninspiring - they all look quite similar. If we're going to be killing a lot of these things, fingers crossed EA adds some variation to them.

And we're not, at this stage anyway, massively interested in Isaac either. This is in part because of his suit, which has a helmet, so we can't see what he looks like properly. But it's also the suit itself, which has that Tron-style neon light thing going on which we're seeing a lot of lately. We do know it will be fully upgradeable so it becomes a heavy mining suit of sorts. Thankfully, we hear EA is currently focus-testing Dead Space's main character. We'll be waiting for more info on him with great interest.

In many ways our time with the game was misleading. EA packed plenty of ammo and enemies to kill so that we would get a good idea of how everything works. But the final game will have a much more pondering, subtle, creepy slower-paced feel, with scarce ammo and plenty of puzzles. EA said it isn't going for a constant stream of jump out of your skin moments. Instead, it wants the player to feel a regular and healthy dose of dread as you explore and progress. We're told hardcore gamers, a demographic Dead Space is clearly aimed at, will take between 50 minutes to an hour just to finish the third chapter (it'll end up being a 20 hour game) with extended periods being "shit scared". That remains to be seen. What we can say now is that Dead Space isn't a straight up third-person action game. This is not Gears of War in space. But you can curb stomp alien babies. A sign perhaps that EA's change in focus to new IP will pay off for us gamers.

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