Doesn't Hold Up
I don't know what Dead Space is trying to be. The controls are very slow and clumsy and the camera is jammed in so close it creates a disorientating effect that has to be intentional. This signifies it is meant to be a horror game. But then it keeps throwing fast enemies at you in action setpieces for which the clumsy controls, claustrophobic camera, and tight corridors are not suited at all. The obvious comparison point would be Resident Evil 4. However, while that game's control scheme was convoluted the actual process of moving Leon around was snappy and reactive, with little touches like the 180-degree quick turn that helped make the limited field of vision manageable and the roundhouse kicks that allowed you to deal with enemies at close range. Issac in Dead Space gets no quarter. He's slow, practically blind, turns like a truck, and his melee options are terrible despite every enemy in the game being a speedy asshole that runs up into your face (and often spawns on top of you).
In short, it's Resident Evil 4 but not as well considered, I guess. It's also got a lot of downtime with mandatory circa-2007 gravity gun puzzles that don't really work properly. I remember people acting like it was a big deal that you could press a button to draw a line to your next objective, but I resented having to use it constantly because the cramped camera and samey corridors made it easy to get turned around (and the map is practically unreadable).
The PC port is a complete mess. This isn't exactly a secret, but I feel it's gotten worse with age. Having vsync on adds a ton of mouse acceleration BUT the mouse sensitivity is also tied to framerate, meaning that if your frame rate is above 60fps your camera movement will tank. You have to go into your GPU's drivers and force vsync off and limit the framerate to 60fps. Once do that the keyboard and mouse controls will just be really bad instead of unusable, and you get screen tearing (even turning on vsync in the drivers caused problems for me.) Once you finally give up and start using an Xbox 360 pad, you realize that there are no in-game options relating to the gamepad... so if you don't like the default joystick sensitivity then you're SOL.
I'm dogging it, but Dead Space is an okay game I suppose. It helps that it's easy enough to get by without the controls and camera being too much of an issue. It's still too long for its own good. There are twelve chapters and by Chapter 7 I was pretty checked out.
