A gruesomely immersive experience.
Good stuff:
The sound design is brilliant. While walking through the dark corridors you'll hear the distant roars of monsters, eerie singing and ominous crying. The screaming of a Necromorph jumping out of a nearby air vent is accompanied by a suitable crescendo, only to be replaced by an unpleasant silence when you've reduced it to a pile of bloody limbs. The roars Isaac let out while desperately flailing his arms, to fend off bloodthirsty monsters are really believable, and the screams in the brutal death animations make you feel his pain. When in vacuum you'll hear nothing but the deepest sounds, and enemies will silently sneak up on you from behind. The sound design in Dead Space is flawless, and playing the game with surround sound or headphones is a must.The game looks great. The graphics are really good on the technical side. The absence of a HUD and the fact that the few cutscenes are viewed from the same position the camera is when playing greatly enhances the immersion. The game is dark, and extremely bloody. Recently cut limbs are accompanied by spurting blood that leaves realistic stains. The animations are also very good and believable - Isaac moves look just like you'd imagine a real human would, and when he's hurt he desperately stumbles away from enemies more than runs from them.
The gameplay is fun. If the game had a quick-turn, the controls wouldn't be able to get better. Cutting off limbs with the varied weapons(ranging from a remote saw blade to an military pulse rifle) never gets old, and the time-slow and telekinesis devices are fun to use. You could slow an enemy down, cut off it's talon while it jumps at you in slo-mo, and the fire the talon at it using telekinesis. You'll fight enemies while jumping around in zero-gravity tunnels and while keeping check on your air meter in vacuum. The huge bosses are fun to fight, and the game culminates in a final boss fight where scale, sound, looks come together to form possibly the most epic final boss ever.
Bad stuff:
11 of the game's 12 chapters are spent on the same ship, so the environments are quite monotone. The fact that enemy variety isn't big doesn't really help - most of the enemies you fight later on are just stronger versions of the ones you fought in the beginning.The game is short, and while there are several difficulty settings the game doesn't really have much replay value. If you're like me you'll play through it several times just because it's so fun, but if you don't love it to death this could be a problem.
While the boss fights are excellent, there aren't exactly plentiful. There are 4 bosses, two of which I wouldn't really count as true bosses.
