This chapter is the seventh in the game, and the goal is for the protagonist Isaac Clarke to traverse through the mining deck and find an SOS beacon to send out into space. His journey begins when he calls up an elevator, but unfortunately it doesn't arrive empty. What's waiting for him inside isn't a group of enemies, but a fallen colleague who's been badly wounded. Unfortunately for this guy, there's no way for Isaac to know whether he's clean or if he's been infected by necromorph aliens. The only way for Isaac to take care of the situation is to finish him off by making the wounded man part with his head.

That Dead Space is a particularly gory game is something that will become quickly apparent. For this we can thank a combination of slick, futuristic weaponry and gruesome enemies that are all too willing to come charging at you with less than friendly intentions. A lot of the weapons available to Clarke are everyday tools from his job as an engineer. This probably won't sound too interesting until you see them in action. Our favorite is a modified buzz saw called the ripper. It has been tricked out to shoot radial saw blades that dismember enemies in a horrifically realistic way.

Dismemberment is a strategy that you'll need to master because it plays a vital role in your success. You can use statis packs to slow time, which gives you some breathing room to shoot at an enemy's head or limbs. (They tend to simply absorb any gunfire aimed at their torsos.) Certain aliens come running at you with spiky limbs flailing all around--including one that looks like a zombie pterodactyl--but despite how scary they are, they represent an excellent opportunity to pick up severed limbs with your TK gun to shoot right back at them. Just make sure that you take the head off, because the aliens you encounter have a nasty habit of sprouting limbs right back. The combat in Dead Space offers a lot of potential for creative use of your weaponry, and given that you'll never find a lot of ammo for your traditional guns, you'll definitely want to stretch your creative muscles as far as you can.

These guns can also be upgraded in the game. You do this by using power nodes, which act as a currency to let you progress through a branching path on a weapon's leveling tree. These affect things such as firepower, reload speed, and so on. The tricky thing is that these nodes are very hard to come by, and you can also use them to unlock certain closed doors that you might encounter. This creates a risk-reward situation in which you need to weight the known upgrade against the uncertain reward locked away behind the door. In the case of our demo, Clarke used one of his nodes to open a door that revealed some stasis packs and a host of logs to help shed some light on the game's plot.

This level, which featured a zero-G sequence complete with an environmental puzzle that requires clever use of your TK gun and floating debris, represents one of the game's 12 chapters. These chapters range from about an hour to an hour-and-a-half each. As a way of adding replay value, EA has given players the ability keep their weapon upgrades whenever they complete and start a new story.

Dead Space is looking like a fun and scary game, even with the nonstop challenges that it throws your way. Fittingly enough, it's scheduled to arrive just before Halloween on October 21.

1UP: Back at E3, you showed a scene where the player is getting pulled through a tunnel -- it was an interactive cut-scene. How many of those are we going to see, besides that one?

Chuck Beaver: That's kind of a complicated scene where it looks like it's going to be a movie, but you've actually got control of the gameplay, and you're actually playing through that whole sequence. And then, depending on how poorly you do at the end, you have this small moment where you get this spectacular death. As far as those types of sequences go -- where you end up with a small, spectacular death -- there's actually a lot. Isaac can die in a practically infinite number of ways because he can be dismembered almost everywhere, just like the enemies can. So, depending on what's happening to you, you can have a lot of that happening.

1UP: From a broad perspective, what do you think Dead Space does in terms of being scary -- in the horror genre -- that other games haven't done before?

CB: Well, we're doing a really tricky combo of keeping the player controls responsive so that they're not sluggish and you're not feeling like you're in molasses. We made [the main character Isaac] reasonably responsive. He shoots relatively fast, and he can aim relatively fast. And then, to do that, we had to take away the "magic" of other [aspects of the game] -- like, your inventory screen doesn't pause [your character], so you can't go in and magically get health, change weapons, pick your ammo, combine things, and come back out better and stronger than you were in the frame that you've paused. So that's how we're trying to keep our version of the tension going. That's unique for us.

1UP: At E3, EA announced that it's also publishing id Software's new shooter, Rage. Do you view that as an internal competitor for the marketing dollars of EA?

CB: Well, no, actually -- no, not for the marketing dollars. They'll get their own slice of the marketing pie. I think Rage is just another product ready to go from EA. So they're not competition, necessarily.

1UP: So you're not campaigning internally to [prevent] them from publishing Doom 4?

CB: [Laughs] No, no -- I wouldn't have any e-mails about that to share with you.

1UP: We've seen a little bit of Dead Space's upgrade system. What can you use that for?

CB: You can actually upgrade literally everything: Health can be upgraded, your stasis and the duration and the energy that it uses -- all the weapons can be upgraded. It's fairly robust; it's not just damage. You can [upgrade] reload speed and rate of fire, and certain weapons have specific characteristics that are also upgradeable. Like that big line gun that you [saw in the demonstration], that's a huge ore cutter -- you can change the width of its blade and even get more energy coming out of that. But you only have a limited number of power nodes, and so you'll have to make choices through the game. How you do it is very strategic depending on what you want to do: trick out a weapon, or more stasis, or more health.

1UP: Is there anything you have to upgrade to get past a certain point, or is it entirely your choice?

CB: No, it's entirely your choice. If you don't upgrade anything, toward the end of the game, it's going to be hard because the enemies get harder. But there are no awful path blockers that are based on upgrades. You can't break your character, if that's what you're thinking.

1UP: For the comics and animated feature, how did the cross-marketing of all this come together? Did you guys come up with a story and then go out and look for people to make it into comics and a movie?

CB: Well, Glen Schofield, the executive producer, as we were putting this story together, he realized that we had a lot more to tell. We'd completed a huge amount of story, and it wasn't all going to fit in the game. And so, we thought, "Let's go do something no one's ever done before -- let's go do a comic and then do an animated feature." So he sent Cate Latchford, one of our producers, off to help secure the talent for that, and we ended up garnering [illustrator Ben Templesmith] and [writer Antony Johnston], and then we got Jimmy Palmiotti and Starz [Media] to do the animated feature. Basically, we had all this story that we'd created, and we wanted to tell the whole thing -- so we got some more properties to tell it with.

1UP: How much influence did you have? Did you basically give them a script and say, "Make it like this?" Or did you give them a few ideas and say, "Flesh it out where you can?"

CB: I was in charge of that. I was the producer for the story, so I was trying to manage all that. We essentially set up a master timeline of all these major events -- "OK, here's where these things happen" -- and then plugged them in spots of it and said, "Now go and make that as best you can -- your interesting version of it," and let them have a lot of creative freedom to write it with the characters and all that sort of stuff, as long as they circled the events. And they were really engaged with that; they thought that was really great.

1UP: Did you ever consider doing a collectors' edition with all this stuff in one package -- you get the movie, the game, and, I don't know, PDFs of the comic book or something like that?

CB: Yeah, we're considering that as much as we can. We'll see what we're able to get through all the channels that we need to get through by the time the game comes out. But, yeah, we'd love to have as much of that as we can.

Source: http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3169319&p=37&sec=PR
EVIEWS

Gamesradar hands-on impression:

A worrying clanging noise began building in volume aboard the Ishimura, the vessel serving as the setting for Event Horizon-ish galactic horrorfest Dead Space.

We were warned. “Be careful, this is LOUD”, guffawed Glen Schofield, Executive Producer on the game. Even so, we weren’t quite prepared for the hurricane that came out of the speakers the first time we came up against the Necromorphs, and we nearly deposited the coffee we’d been drinking directly onto EA’s plush couch.

So it’s loud. Dead Space is also very big and very dark, with an admirable attention to detail. Stepping out of a crew transport and into a deserted changing area, we were struck by the level of thought that had gone into the surroundings. Toilets have been re-imagined, vending machines futurized. And coating Dead Space’s visuals is the faint orange glow of holographic maps and info points. But there are also a lot of red stains on the floor. And some weird gloopy stuff stuck to the walls.

You take a Resident Evil 4-style over-the-shoulder view with hero Isaac. There’s a similar deliberate, vaguely clunky sense to his movement as well, which gets across the weight of his armour as well as the reduced-gravity surroundings. Venturing out of the crew area and into a shadowy mess of winding metallic corridors, it wasn’t the sharp visuals that got us. It was the cacophony of clangs, low groans and hisses, combined with the Vader-like breathing coming from Isaac’s helmet that put us on edge. At times it was overwhelmingly claustrophobic.

Eventually we came to the edge of the massive engine room, and to the first part of our objective (get the engines running to power the centrifugal gravity machinery further on in the ship). Suddenly, all that noise exploded into actual mutated spider-people, coming straight at us. Whipping out our plasma cutter, we found it straightforward and damned satisfying to slice off a creature’s limbs and then stamp on its head. It was also massively gory, but we’re getting used to extreme amounts of gore. Anyway, we fought off a horde of them before activating the engine to complete the demo.

Source: http://www.gamesradar.com/ps3/dead-space/preview/hands-on-dead-sp
ace/a-20071204131117747057/g-2007092414531265010/p-2