Once on board, Clarke must deal with an array of ship failures as his crewmates feed him a constant stream of disaster scenarios, all the while fighting through hordes of mutated miners. The game is played from a third-person perspective, but rather than looking over Clarke's shoulder, the camera has been pulled back to view most of his upper body. This allows the game to place the important in-game indicators—life, air, ammo and special weapons counters—on Isaac's suit rather than in a heads-up display.

The horror upon the Ishimura takes a variety of forms, beginning with humanoids whose arms have been replaced with giant blades, and moving on to giant space worms, fireball-throwing tentacled horrors, zombie-like breeders carrying a payload of fast-crawling mini-monsters, and more.

Clarke uses a variety industrial and military firearms to combat these threats. He starts with his trusty plasma cutter, which fires bolts of red-hot energy but quickly acquires new weapons, such as the limb-chewing "ripper," the military-grade pulse rifle, a shock-wave bursting force gun and that ubiquitous tool of the spaceborne monster slayer, the flamethrower. Each weapon offers second firing modes—e.g., the "contact beam" normally fires a surge of energy at a single target, but it can also send out a 360-degree blast that hits everything nearby.

Being an engineer, Clarke also has a few tricks of his own. The titanic machinery aboard the floating city-ship moves at blazing-fast speed; Clarke can slow it down using his "stasis" effect. This blast causes machinery to move at a fraction of its normal speed, allowing Clarke to maneuver around it without getting crushed. The effect also works on living things, and Clarke can use it to slow his enemies. He also has a "kinesis" effect that works as short-range telekinesis. He can use it to grab inanimate objects and either bring them to him or throw them at enemies.

Strategic dismemberment

DeadSpace straddles the line between survival horror and shooter, drawing inspiration in equal parts from Half-Life and Resident Evil, as well as cinematic horror classics like Aliens and The Thing. It's also hard not to see the hand of Halo in here as well, particularly in the levels involving the parasitic Flood.

This kind of homage can be problematic when the game itself has nothing new to offer—if you've seen one crawling-hand-like horror spilling down starship corridors looking to attach itself to a human host, you've seen them all—but DeadSpace avoids that trap by introducing a few good mechanics of its own.

It starts with the setup; the idea of a mining starship that cracks open planets to mine the resulting debris field provides a great "big science" feel to the game and creates some beautiful in-game visuals whenever the hero manages to get close to the ship's hull. The sight of a ruined planet hanging over the Ishimura is breathtaking, and a welcome change from hours spent crawling through the ship's innards.

Like most science-fiction games (and movies, for that matter), DeadSpace assumes future humans will be able to generate artificial gravity, but that doesn't mean it always works. The ship is littered with zero-gravity regions where players must launch themselves from region to region in an effort to avoid enemies and solve some mechanical problem. It's not complete microgravity; Clarke is wearing his trusty magnetic boots and thus still "walks" across surfaces, but everything else in the rooms floats, and he can retrieve (and throw) objects using his "kinesis" gun. It's a nice touch, and it helps reinforce the game's space-based setting.

There's also "strategic dismemberment." The game takes the concept that zombies can be killed only by a shot to the head and extends it to its mutant horrors, who can be stopped only by blasting away their limbs. It's a nice change from the standard modus operandi of most shooters, in which players simply blast away at anything that moves and hope it dies. This approach requires players to take aim and conserve ammunition, both of which enhance the game's horror aspects.

DeadSpace's story isn't nearly as innovative, as players spend most of their time averting disaster after disaster while slaying monsters. It makes adequate use of shocker moments, with monsters leaping out of air vents and such, but there are simply too many aliens to make it a true horror game. These moments would have had more impact if the number of monsters had been reduced by a third and the game gave players more time to catch their breath (and get lulled into complacency). As is, players spend most of their time grinding through horror after horror, and the constant stream of gore can get old.

This in turn can lead to a shortage of ammunition; while the game has "stores" scattered throughout the ship where players can buy upgraded weapons and suits, it's all too easy to run out of just about everything while trying to get from one area to the next. This wouldn't be an issue if Engineer Clarke managed to MacGyver together a chainsaw, but melee weapons are in short supply on the ship.

Still, the game works. Played with the lights low and the sound up, it will generate enough scares to keep players jumping, and there are enough hooks to keep players interested until the end.