This game has every prerequisite to become a romantic comedy… no wait, hear me out, I’ll explain after the jump.

This is a story of a guy and a girl who meet under difficult circumstances, trying to work things out despite their differences, with all kinds of emotional ups and downs on the way. This sounds like the plot to every romantic comedy to have come out… well… ever. But add some terrifying monsters, graphic dismemberment and a feeling that you can get mauled at any time… and you have the horror adventure that is Dead Space 2.

Holy shit is this scary. And I don’t mean the kind of scary where your only fear is to have to sit through a lengthy cutscene again if you die. No no, this game is freaking terrifying. All kinds of creepy manifestations are waiting behind every corner, ready to impale or rip off your limbs. This game is definitely not for the faint of heart or the young gamers out there. The gore is very graphic, especially in death scenes.

This time it’s personal

Your name is Isaac Clarke and you wake up in a medical facility on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, with no recollection of the last three years. The story picks up where the interquel title Dead Space: Ignition left us hanging and that means that all kinds of hell is going on around you. You quickly realize that you have to stop this madness somehow and learn that the Marker, a big reverse engineered pylon of alien technology, is corrupting all life surrounding it.

Dead Space 2 is a third person survival horror shooter set in 2510, three years after the events on the USG Ishimura in the first title. If you’ve ever played a Resident Evil game, you’ll be right at home here. The developers behind Dead Space 2 have acknowledged that they’re big fans of and heavily influenced by the Japanese survival horror franchise.

Lock’n’load

Throughout the game, your arsenal of weapons expand, although you can only carry around four at a time. While adding some welcomed variety, I found it easier to just stick with your first weapon – the plasma cutter – along with one or two alternative weapons. You can upgrade the weapons to deal more damage and have bigger clip sizes. Unfortunately you don’t find a lot of power nodes, which you use to upgrade and if you buy them from a store, you’ll have less money for new weapons, armor and most importantly ammo and health packs. So in reality, you’ll probably only use one or two upgraded weapons, since you don’t get enough nodes to upgrade your entire arsenal..

As you move through the dim lighted and claustrophobic settings, you’re constantly getting jumped by all kinds of creepy mutations and the only thing preventing a quick and painful death, is your determination to stop the madness, by destroying as many necromorph’s on your way – and of course the tools of destruction at your disposal. Other than your physical weapons, you also have a kinesis ability, where you can shoot off a limb from a charging enemy, grab the limb mid air and shoot it back at them, impaling them to the wall. Yes – it’s exactly as cool as it sounds. You also have a stasis module at your disposal, with which you can slow down time for a limited time, but often enough time to dismember whatever monster is charging at you, stopping them in their tracks.

Scary stuff keeps being scary

Dead Space 2 has a lot of great things going for it. It’s in a genre that’s not overly crowded and it oozes quality, with a great presentation, great gameplay and a great story told at a steady pace. While delivering an exciting and terrifying experience at the same time, I can’t help but think, that the gameplay relies a little too much on your ability to get startled by the endless masses of necromorph’s charging at you from every corner. With time, you get more and more accustomed to the fact, that these things want you dead, which means the scare-factor diminishes and an important element of the game loses some of its strength. Nevertheless, this is a quality game and should leave you satisfied, if you’re into horror, gore and dismemberment from a game.