Machogames: Dead Space Is Spooky, Awesome. Spooky Awesome!

It’s too bad we didn’t get around to reviewing Dead Space before Halloween. The first-person shooter from EA is dark and frightening enough to provide serious scares to even the most seasoned gamer.
With the exception of online multi-player ability, Dead Space really has it all. As for the storyline, it would probably be best to let the good people at EA explain this, since I’m not entirely sure if the main character is a military man or a mechanic.

Set five hundred years in the future, Dead Space follows the story of Isaac Clarke, a normal systems engineer, who is sent with a small repair team to restore communications aboard an immense mining ship, the USG Ishimura. Once onboard the vessel, Isaac discovers that the crew has unearthed an ancient and malevolent alien presence far beneath the planet’s surface and brought it onboard. It’s a living nightmare onboard the Ishimura, which has turned into a floating bloodbath, as the crew has been unspeakably mutilated and infected by an ancient alien scourge. Clarke’s repair mission becomes one of survival as he fights not just to save himself, but to return the artifact to the planet at any cost.

Systems engineer. That’s the ticket. Since no one would really be interested in a game that revolves around a character who changes gaskets, the “shoot ‘em up” action in Dead Space gets going real quick. Players have access to a vast array of different weapons, with which they must do a very different kind of battle with the alien enemy.
Usually, you can hit the bad guys in the chest with your firepower to put ‘em down for good. Not here. In Dead Space, one must dismember your opponents, limb by limb, to slow them down enough to kill them. This is difficult to get used to when you first start playing, since our natural instincts after years of gaming is to aim for the center of mass, if not the head. But once you retrain yourself to shoot at arms and legs you’ll feel like you’ve been doing it forever.
Play with the lights out. The enemies have a tendency to just appear out of nowhere. The storyline is excellent, the music is appropriately creepy and the gameplay is extremely solid. The only minor flaw I found was the awkward hand placement required to have your character run (on XBOX 360, hold “LB” with “LS”). This will feel annoying, but its easy to adjust to it. As for the lack of multiplayer, sometimes you need a break from your friends anyway. Recommended.
On a side note, the aforementioned creepy music is available for sale on its own.

The score features over three hours of music recorded during two different recording sessions. In the first session Graves conducted sixty musicians of the acclaimed Northwest Sinfonia Orchestra at the Bastyr Chapel in Seattle, and a year later Graves conducted sixty players of the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra and twenty voice choir at the world famous Skywalker Sound Scoring Stage. During both sessions, co-produced by Jason Graves and Rod Abernethy, the orchestra was recorded individually by section (woodwinds, brass, percussion and strings) with multiple dynamic levels and variations to be implemented as adaptive layers of music in the game. EA’s audio team designed the music system to be multi-layered so the music could be mixed at run-time based on gameplay and situation.

Get it here.
Available for XBOX 360, Playstation 3 and PC. It’s $59.99 on the consoles, $49.99 on the PC. A special edition version, only for the XBOX 360, can be purchased through EA for a whopping $149.95.
EA Unleashes a Bloodbath as Dead Space Ships to Retail [Business Wire]
Dead Space Reveals Spine-Tingling Score Composed and Conducted by Jason Graves [Business Wire]