Let's begin by putting a few of Dead Space 3's nastier pre-release demons to rest. That cover system everybody threw their Plasma Cutters out of the pram about last year? It's barely a system at all - a mere afterthought, designed to streamline a handful of human-on-human shoot-outs which swallow up around half-an-hour in total. The implementation's also unobtrusive to the point of unnoticeable - simply crouch while nudging up against an object, and you'll pop your head over it when you aim. Long story short, Dead Space is still distinguishable at a glance from Gears of War.

That ice planet, Tau Volantis? With its starkly-lit exteriors and ostensible shortage of hiding spots for gristly killing machines? It wouldn't be our first choice of survival horror environment, true, though white-outs and caches of deep-frozen Necromorph lend the surface a certain John Carpenter-esque thrill. But to reach the benighted world, you'll have to travel through an enormous spaceship graveyard - an orbital frosting of undead-ridden debris several miles thick, that harbours a good four to five hours' worth of quarantine zones, dodgy generators, smashed-up laboratories and bloodied elevators.



Returning Dead Space fans will be in their element here - inching through the creaky, flaking orifices of each craft with gun raised, circling around vents as you would a radiation spill, rifling through closets for health, ammo and, nowadays, resources to spend on satisfyingly demented custom weapons. There's even a vessel with its own internal tram system, in memory of the one players had to fix while touring the ill-fated Ishimura, and missions that take returning lead Isaac Clarke into the debris field itself. Out there, our man with the Marker-polluted brain is just one meandering nugget of tinfoil and LEDs among many, albeit with a delightful chewy centre.

Once you do go planetside, you'll find that Tau Volantis isn't all icicles and dramatic cloud formations. The pulse-deadening Arctic trappings quickly give way to a series of brutalised interiors that are every bit as pregnant with threat as those drifting through the void, hundreds of miles above. Dead Space's appendage-fixated combat loses nothing for the change of scene, either - as ever, scything away limbs results in faster kills and a diminished likelihood of getting scythed in turn.

Despite a shortage of new blood, the game's enemies remain delightfully unsportsmanlike, rushing under your shots unless doused in time-slowing Stasis. There's nothing quite as satisfying (or economical) as pinning one to a wall with its own, telekinetically propelled arm. Unless it's tearing that arm off in the first place, of course.



Does the controversial introduction of co-op detract from all this? Not really. New pal John Carver isn't the most uplifting company, but if you tackle Dead Space 3 in single-player you'll rarely bump into him. There's no AI partner to babysit in the absence of a second player, and cutscenes branch cunningly to suit, sneaking Carver into and out of the blank spots in each sequence like an imaginary friend.

Two's company

Co-op can't be ignored entirely - those who brave the horrors of Tau Volantis in pairs will glean new insights on both Clarke and Carver, via a handful of co-op-only side missions and some jarring character-specific hallucinations. All in all, however, Visceral has made good on its promise not to let the feature scupper the franchise's trademark claustrophobia - that soul-withering awareness that the environment itself wants your head on a prong. Much as with the cover system, you need never know it's there.

Given that so many of our fears over Dead Space 3 have proven unfounded, why, then, is the number at the bottom of this page a point shy of an urgent recommendation? Well, the plot's a good place to start - it's a shambolic retread of series themes, blundering through obvious twists and laboured emotional arcs to a finale that ties up the mystery of the Markers in spectacularly stupid style. Dead Space is hardly renowned for its sophisticated storyline, of course, but the latest chapter makes the original's slightly aimless tale of malfunctioning components look like the collected works of Proust.

Clarke's thinly imagined breed of deep space dementia is a card that's been overplayed to extinction, and Carver's bellowing family issues aren't all that compelling either. Leading lady Ellie - one of Dead Space 2's sharper, more sympathetic personalities - is now a big-lipped, deep-chested damsel in distress. There's a sense throughout that the writers are struggling to justify the game's existence. The villain of the piece, for instance, has paper-thin motivations that he nonetheless feels obliged to explain at length, using different combinations of the same words (a pleasantly sinister vocal performance by Legacy of Kain veteran Simon Templeman makes the pain bearable, just about).



You'll have more fun deciphering the past than the present, threading together century-old tales of savagery and despair via audio diaries, snippets of video and the battle-proven emergent storytelling gambit that is cryptic gore-graffiti. For this reason, visiting all of the game's optional areas is essential - the pick of the bunch drops Clarke into a maze of traps constructed by a batty survivalist with a taste for Country and Western. But the stories are all variations on the theme of "hey, my mate's been acting really weird since we dug up Mysterious Artefact #134 - good heavens, Necromorphs!" - and unlike the Ishimura's well-knit payload of micro-narratives, they never cohere into an arresting whole.

Nor does the game itself. While a serviceable, vaguely scary and visually robust action title, Dead Space 3 is a project born of EA's thirsty pockets - one last blast at a moderately popular IP before next generation consoles arrive. Most of the things fans loved about the original are here, and the new features are cleverly mixed with the existing ones, but in terms of the structure, Visceral is treading water. Dead Space isn't dead by any means, but the spark isn't quite there.

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