(Also posted by me on Freeola.com)

Even if you're not a survival horror fan, there's still a pretty good chance you've heard of Dead Space. Not only has the game been heavily advertised and heavily hyped by the gaming press, but it's also crossed over into other mediums. At the time of writing, there's a five issue Dead Space comic book and an animated Dead Space. Which you could understand if the game was part of a previously established series, such as the Silent Hill series. EA must have had so much confidence in Dead Space that they were willing to fork out large sums of money to get the aforementioned comic and movie made. Unfortunately for them, and for gamers everywhere, their confidence appears to have been somewhat misplaced.

Dead Space's storyline reads like a rip-off of Event Horizon, with you and your fellow crewmen sent in to investigate an abandoned mining ship. Only - and you'd never see this coming - the ship has been taken over by some evil force that sends all manner of nasties after you. Nasties which conveniently separate you from your crewmates, leaving you to fight your way through the ship on your own. You are still in radio communication with them, which means that you get the joy of having them send you on errand after errand after errand. The first of which is collecting a bunch of items from different rooms in order to get the ship's tram system working. And so you do their bidding, and finally activate the tram. At which point they get on without even waiting for you, leaving you to wait for the next tram. Shortly after which they contact you again, with another object collection/switch flicking errand for you.

The game as a whole is an exercise in tedium, which isn't a good thing given that Dead Space is supposed to be scary. You can almost predict when the enemies are going to come at you - it's certainly a given that the apparently lifeless body on the floor is going to jump up and attack you when you get near it. The only interesting thing about your foes - is that headshots don't kill them - instead, the best way to disable them is by cutting off their limbs with a few well placed bullets. In fact, that may be the only interesting thing about the whole game which is survival horror by the numbers.

While the graphics are fairly detailed, the rooms look so damn similar that you don't feel you're making any progress at all. It's like he ship as a whole has been painted brown and grey by some mad interior decorator. You just wander from linear level to linear level, collecting the items you have to find or flicking the switches you need to activate just to get to the next level. Unless you really have played every other survival horror out there, there's no reason to get Dead Space. It doesn't bring anything new to the table, and with its constant errand running it feels like a step backwards for the genre. For all the hype it's received, Dead Space is as mediocre as they come.