Video game of the week: Dead Space

Mutant! Alien! Zombie! Horror!

We're getting sick of all this modern, casual rubbish we see flooding our games consoles these days. Spore, LittleBigPlanet, Wii Music... these aren't proper games! A game should be about firing great big guns into the twisted, drooling faces of fearsome space thingies. That's a real game for real men.

Luckily for us manly types, there's Dead Space, a bloody, violent survival horror, that's basically Resident Evil 4 mixed with System Shock 2 and a pinch of Doom.

It would have been easy for this to come as a half-baked theft of all the best bits out of these classics with none of its own merits, and had that been the case we'd be greasing up our EA rogering stick and going at it till we hit daylight. But instead Dead Space has managed to be truly impressive; it is both a worthy tribute to the titles that inspired it and by far the most terrifying game we've played all year.

You step into the shoes of Isaac Clarke, an engineer sent along with a small team to find out what's gone wrong with a USG Ishimura, a big, creepy space ship that gobbles up planets. It seems the Ishimura has been picking up sinister extra-terrestrial artefacts when it shouldn't have, and surprise, surprise: the crew's been turned into murderous, flesh-eating monsters. D'oh!

As you follow the familiarly winding plot, you'll scurry about the ship pressing buttons, killing enemies and stumbling over ammunition, health packs and, oddly, money. You'll also find audio and text logs (thanks System Shock!) that help you piece together the events that led to the Ishimura's demise. It's a bit of a shame that EA didn't put a bit more into this in the earlier stages of game.

We had a very good idea of what was going on already because we had watched all the Dead Space animated comic book series before hand. If you missed out though, you won't have a clue what's really happening until quite a few hours in, so it's definitely worth watching the prequel videos first as they will give you some rough idea about what Unitology and the all-important Marker are all about.

The controls are very fast and fluid and worth well with the Resi 4 inspired, over-the-shoulder viewpoint. You can aim quickly and precisely and unlike most survival horrors which make your character slow and cumbersome to increase the tension, you're pretty nippy on your feet.

Dead Space's grand innovation is that you have to shoot the limbs off your blood-thirsty foes instead of going for the more traditional torso or head shot. It's a little shallow, seeing as you're simply exchanging one type of shot for another, but it has given EA the inspiration to come up with a largely unique set of weaponry which turn mutants into wet chunks of meat in a range of exciting ways.

Nearly every corner presents you with a new encounter with some grotesque creature or other, accompanied by a moody, ominous score, a rich array of background noises to keep your nerves a-jangling.

Sometimes the constant, unrelentingly oppressive atmosphere can leave you fatigued, and you'll soon work out that pretty much every where you'd expect an alien to be hiding, there is in fact an alien in hiding. So you'll end up walking around in constant aim mode, fleeing at the first surge of game music and crossing wider spaces in an unnatural forwards-and-backwards gait, trying to find the invisible wall that sets off the next wave of attacks.

But when you happen on a lone enemy you may find yourself gleefully charging it down screaming your hatred and slicing off its flailing limbs. It's weirdly empowering.

Dead Space proves that when EA sets it mind to it, it can't necessarily come up with something original, but it can craft a beautifully polished, top quality, intense and, above all, engaging gameplay experience. We hope it keeps it up.