EA insists it has turned over a new leaf, focusing on producing high quality original IP and distancing itself from the licensed IP and copycat factory it had become. It was a little hard to swallow at first; Dead Space looked like it was a BioShock copycat, and rumours even persisted that it was at one time called System Shock 3. EA may well have proved their point with Dead Space, as it is easily one of the finest games the company has developed in years.

Dead Space is set in a fairly typical futuristic spaceship which has been devastated by an encounter with an extraterrestrial threat. The Concordance Extraction Corporation loses contact with its “Planet Cracker” class mining vessel, the ISS Ishimura, and sends a small team to fix the ship’s communication array. You play as the crew’s engineer, Isaac Clarke, who’s also got a little personal agenda attached to the mission; his love interest Nicole is stationed on the ISS Ishimura, and had recently sent him a rather cryptic message.

The mission goes to the dogs from the first minute of the game. The crew crash lands on the Ishimura, effectively ruining their chances of an easy escape. Then one of your buddies gets sliced up by one of the Ishimura’s crew, who has turned into a Necromorph, and everybody gets separated. At first, the game is all about travelling to the different levels of the Ishimura and re-establishing vital systems while Hammond and Kendra bark orders at you and bicker with each other over the comm.-link. However, as you get further into the game, the true nature of the evil that engulfed the Ishimura comes to the surface, and you get to deal with that mess too.

Dead Space’s production values are amazing. If you view the elements of its presentation and story individually, they can seem pretty derivative – the story is inspired by Aliens and Event Horizon, the audio/video/text logs have been used in System Shock, Doom 3 and BioShock, and the game seldom removes control from the player during the game, an approach made famous by Half-Life. Dead Space brings these elements together and makes them it’s own, never seeming worse off for covering familiar territory. The best part of it is the HUD; rather than a fixed HUD on the screen, health, oxygen and stasis indicators appear on Isaac’s suit, ammo indicators are shown on the weapons, and any objective markers are projected onto the floor from Isaac’s hand with a press of the right stick. Menus such as the inventory screen, store front and text logs appear in front of you in a Minority Report-like fashion. HUD-less games can sometimes seem pretty tacky or half-assed, but Dead Space remains dedicated to the concept throughout its duration and executes it with a considerable level of polish.

The atmosphere onboard the Ishimura is chilling. You’ll hear the crying and whimpering of survivors, the howling and screeching of nearby necromorphs and the tearing of flesh and metal, which serves to make the player feel uneasy and keep them on edge. Some areas of the ship look fine, as though nothing has gone wrong, while others have been showered with blood and littered with dead bodies and severed limbs and heads. Rooms are often covered in messages in a specific code, which players can crack to reveal hints about the game. Character models are richly detailed and superbly animated, though facial detail can be a little lacking.

The inspiration for Dead Space’s gameplay can also be traced back to another title: Resident Evil 4. EA has taken the “survival action” mould from Capcom’s masterpiece and jazzed it up with a few Western touches, like the ability to move and shoot at the same time. The aiming system, locational damage and shop-upgrade system are all fundamentally Resident Evil 4 – again, not a bad thing, because EA has succeeded in applying these ideas to their own game.

While restoring Ishimura’s systems and getting to the bottom of what happened, you’re going to face a heck of a lot of Necromorphs. These creatures, although once human, come in a variety of forms, but all of them have rather nasty claws which they like to use to slash poor Isaac to pieces. Some of them play to common horror stereotypes, looking like infants or having too many teeth, but they’re all really good at scaring the crap out of you at inopportune moments by busting out of ventilation shafts, through the walls and sneaking up behind you. Others have a tendency to burst into smaller creatures that have a habit of latching onto Isaac and chewing through his health like a beaver through wood.

Pumping endless rounds of ammo into Necromorphs won’t bring them down, nor will a single shot to the head. Instead, players need to selectively blast certain limbs off the creatures to put them out of their misery. Even then, they don’t do down easily – Necromorphs will change their strategies and movement based on which limbs are removed first. Being an engineer and not a soldier, a lot of Isaac’s weaponry is improvised. The first weapon you get is the plasma cutter, which is almost like a cross between a pistol and a set of bolt cutters – it’s pretty powerful, and great for knocking limbs off. There’s some standard issue weapons like a plasma rifle and a charge laser, which are useful, but just not as fun as the Ripper, a tethered buzz saw which makes short work of enemy limbs and creates one heck of a gory mess.

In order to expand your arsenal, you need to find blueprints left around the ship and take them to shop terminals. Here you can also spend credits on ammo and health supplies as well as upgrading Isaac’s suit. New suits give armour and health bonuses, along with expanding Isaac’s inventory. Inventory management can be a real pain in the early parts of the game, as the first couple of suits only have a small number of slots, and there’s a lot of stuff to carry around. You can cram stuff into the safe at the shop terminal, but doing so requires more backtracking than it’s worth. Power nodes can be found around the ship and bought from the store – by finding workbenches, you can use nodes to upgrade your weapons and suit, increasing health, gun damage, ammo capacity and firing speed.

Repairing many of the Ishimura’s systems involves quite a bit of puzzle solving. Many of these puzzles are solved by using either kinesis, which lets Isaac pick up and manipulate objects (or shoot them at unsuspecting enemies) or stasis, which can be used to slow down objects and enemies. Slowing down enemies and pinpointing the exact limbs to remove will save one’s butt many times. Perhaps the only bad puzzle sections of the game are the unnecessarily difficult turret based ones, where players need to protect the Ishimura from asteroids and a rather large Necromorph using a rather unwieldy mass driver.

Not all of the action in Dead Space takes place in confined rooms, corridors and cargo bays. Many areas of the Ishimura have sustained massive damage, and as such, you’ll often travel through areas with no gravity or oxygen. Making big leaps through zero gravity can be pretty cool, but you’ve got to be careful not to fly off the edge of the ship. Rapidly depleting oxygen means you need to be quick about running from place to place, which makes the action rather frantic when you’ve got Necromorphs on your tail. EA has done an excellent job of capturing the vacuum of space; players can only hear the sounds Isaac makes (which are also rather muffled), so you won’t know if enemies are chasing you until you see them.

The twelve chapters of Dead Space will take anywhere from 8 to 15 hours depending on player skill and the difficulty level chosen. The reward for beating the game is a fat wad of cash, a nice suit of armour, a bunch of power nodes and the impossible difficulty mode. You can play through again with all of your new equipment, but only on the same difficulty level, which is a bit of a bummer for those hoping to take some powered up stuff into the harder modes. There are a few minor bonus mini-games that can be found in the ship, such as a shooting range and a rather bizarre zero g basketball game.

Dead Space is a phenomenal achievement for EA. It might not be the most original of games, and many of its play mechanics are borrowed, but the mix of these elements and the fantastic presentation and production values makes for one hell of a gaming experience. The only thing holding the game back from greatness are its short-ish length and some dodgy turret sections. If Dead Space is any indication as to the quality of the output of this “new EA”, we’re in for some fantastic new games in the future.