Let’s start this review with a question: what puts you in mild panic? Getting on the train in the morning and realising you have forgotten your monthly pass? Realising that you’ve left your phone and wallet in the office on a Friday? Finding out that you’ve sent a highly compromising text message to your ex girlfriend in error? These completely-unrelated-to-me-in-any-shape-or-form-honest moments put a bloody big chill in your spine for sure, and are perfect examples of how you feel at regular intervals when you are playing Dead Space.

The premise – being an engineer who gets cut off from his support crew during a mission to find out what’s happened on a derelict space craft – sounds pretty tried-and-tested on paper, sure, and I openly admit that a cursory check of the info before I played it did little to fill me with much excitement. This rather lazy approach soon came undone as soon as I fired the thing up, though, as it became very clear very quickly that playing through the game was going to be rather enjoyable indeed.

The reasons for this are many and varied, but the primary thing that makes Dead Space so enjoyable is that it is genuinely scary and utterly creepy from the first moments right through to the last. What on paper is a pretty standard third-person shooter becomes a nerve-jangling trip through a hellish nightmare, with enemies flying at you from all directions one minute and then unbearable periods of quiet where you are convinced that the appearance of a monster is more likely than the occurrence of Montezuma’s revenge after a vindaloo.

It’s that oppressive sense of fear that makes each enemy encounter panic-stricken, with ammunition and health drops just about infrequent enough and monsters just about powerful enough to trigger the part of your brain that reminds you that, amidst all the bullet-showering going on, you really should be trying to save the stuff in case something bigger is looming around the corner. Taking this idea a little further, the game encourages you to shoot at the enemies’ limbs to slow them down and cause them to either bleed to death or be stompable, although in the middle of a frantic fight there’s a fair whack of bottle that’s needed to pull it off properly.

As you’d expect with a game using the Havoc engine, the destructibility of your enemies and the use of physics plays a chunky part in your battle tactics. Whilst not being the type of game that requires sublime military precision to allow you to progress through, being able to blow the legs off a rampaging freak of nature to give you time to stamp on it can save both ammo and health. A little later into proceedings you get monsters who drag horrific glowing explosive tumours along with them, and whilst blowing them up from a distance seems a good ploy, allowing it to get close enough so that it takes out surrounding monsters with it works a treat.

Talking of the monsters, Dead Space does a pretty fantastic job of propelling all sorts of nasty things at you that’ll have your skin crawling. In a way it’s rather reminiscent of Doom 3 in that the monsters are some sort of horrible alien/human hybrids, hugely deformed and always on the attack. In particular, the horrible little spiders that explode out of things on occasion (often with a baby’s head on the top) are the kinds of things that make you want to spin around firing bullets randomly in the hope that you’ll hit one before it hits you, which is always a good sign of a game hitting their target audience nice and hard.

On top of this, the game’s audio and visual assets are particularly pleasing, with all kinds of gurgling, screaming and clunking going on at the exact right moments to get you feeling a bit uneasy, and the dark steel shell of a deserted space ship mixing very well with the more organic things such as monsters and the occasional bit of odd fleshy wall and floor. It’s a beautiful game to listen to and, despite the grime, the blood and the torsos scattered left, right and centre, it’s a beautiful game to look at too.

It’s through all of this, the terror, the panic, the sheer oh-crap-I-want-to-get-out-of-here atmosphere that you must progress, with twelve chapters seeing you hopping about various areas of the ship (and occasionally out of it) to complete objectives and hopefully seal your escape. Though you must do the odd bit of backtracking now and again, you’ll always find yourself presented with new challenges and routes as you do so it alleviates a lot of the pain from the situation whilst also allowing you to get relatively familiar with a few of the game’s bigger levels. The story does a good job of stringing you along and then twists its way superbly through the latter few chapters, leaving you with a very enjoyable package.

Although a lot of the time is spent popping the limbs off enemies as previously discussed, there’s also plenty of exploration and a couple of puzzles chucked in for good measure, although none are particularly taxing and are more about trying to complete the given task quickly in case you get submerged with monsters. The main two alternate ideas to shooting bullets that you are given are the ability to grab objects rather like the gravity gun in Half Life 2 and shoot them/move them around, and an ability to cast a temporary slow down on enemies and objects to give you the upper hand or the answer to a puzzle.

The pleasing thing with this is that they are introduced reasonably early in the game, and throughout they are used logically enough that you are never left scratching your head at a particularly obtuse piece of logic from the game designers. That’s not to say that the game is easy, of course, but to my mind the sign of a good game is that it allows you to familiarise yourself with the techniques it gives you relatively quickly and then provides ample variety in the puzzles you find to always challenge you to use them effectively in different circumstances. Dead Space ticks this box very nicely indeed.

Another major plus point is that the game also gives you power nodes with which you can head to scattered power benches to upgrade the weaponry you have, your abilities and your armour suit. These nodes are not particularly difficult to find but are infrequent enough to mean that you can’t upgrade everything you have, so you’ll have to carefully consider which weapon you want to boost and whether you prefer boosting your suit to increase health or boosting your powers to hamper enemies further. Being a Liverpool fan I am always of the mindset that defence is definitely the best form of attack, so a fully pimped armour suit was my avenue of choice.

The gameplay isn’t flawless, of course, as nothing really ever is. Having not tried the console versions yet I can’t really comment on their control, but the PC version I sat down with initially infuriated me with the sluggish way in which your character turns and aims, even with sensitivity increased. It’s almost as if they made the control system work for the console versions first and then ported it over to the PC version with little change, and as a result it’s functional rather than fun. You could argue that by making the controls sluggish it makes the sense of panic in fire fights all the more prominent, but that’s the other side of the coin for you.

The other issue is that the game occasionally throws you into situations where you feel you are being slightly unfairly challenged, mostly at the times when the areas you are in suddenly lock down and you are faced with swarm after swarm of monsters. There were a couple of times in the game where I found myself up the virtual creek with no paddle and having to dash like Chris Moyles to a pie van through areas to get to a shop or a safe haven, and it always felt slightly cheap. Not game breaking by any sense of course, but still a negative.

Those taken into account, you still end up with an absorbing, often terrifying game that fans of horror will lap up. The game’s mechanics are solid and challenging, the atmosphere provided by the visuals and sound utterly terrifying and it’ll last you too – there’s well over ten hours to be spent wandering around here. As an example of a game purposefully closing the walls in on you and funnelling you down a path you know you don’t want to tread through sheer fear of what is around the corner, it’s right up there with the best in the genre. One final bit of advice – make sure you don’t have cups of tea anywhere near you when you play; tea stains on jeans are most certainly not cool.