From its shocking opening moments, it will feel familiar to anyone who has played Dead Space. 'Strategic dismemberment' with weapons such as the plasma cutter is the key to surviving Dead Space 2 (click to enlarge)ĭead Space 2 once again puts the player in the space suite of Isaac Clarke, the engineer that lived through a brush with the “necromorphs” (humans turned into monsters by an alien parasite) that wiped out most of the crew of the space ship Ishimura. Developed by Visceral Games, it was an intelligent reinvention of the survival-horror genre that borrowed the best elements from the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, disposed of their more archaic gameplay elements and transplanted the setting into space. The original Dead Space was one of the new intellectual properties that Electronic Arts created this console generation in a bid to become the cool guy among the big, franchise-milking games publishers.

Dead Space 2 is an unrelenting package of surprise and suspense that dials the intensity of its predecessor right up to 111. That didn’t stop every encounter from turning into a white-knuckle fight for survival that left me limping to the next exit, praying that there would be a save point and some supplies around the corner. It was seldom a surprise when some corpse briefly illuminated by my flash light reanimated into a shambling abomination or a hellish creature burst from a steel cabinet. There are few survival-horror game clichés that it doesn’t reach for at some point in its running time – the rattling in the air vents, the monsters that leap from conveniently placed closets, the horrific hallucinations that plague its hapless protagonist, the gruesome animations that accompany death.īut its execution is so skilful that I spent most of the game creeping carefully around its dark corridors with my gun aimed and my heart in throat, anyway. Dead Space 2 has no right to be as nerve-wracking as it is.

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