Horror. The very nature of the genre, designed to bring out our worst fears, phobias and high school ladies running round in just their underpants if Scream and I know what you did last Wednesday or whatever it was is to be believed. It brings to life that which is unholy and should be dead, like Robin Williams if he tries to do another sh*tty film again, with the most fearful thing being that which used to be human but then is perverted to the point of tears.

Survival horror is even worse when you are constantly scared, trying to survive with few resources and pretty much the odds are pretty much the same as the US being found guilty of a war-crime in using Barney the Dinosaur as torture; slim at best. Examples in the movie world are The Hills Have Eyes, 28 Days Later, Insert-whatever of the Dead, and as it’s sick, twisted and amazing that the audience themselves survive to the end of this horrible affair; The Devil Wears Prada.

But when it came to the world of Video Games, you had few real recent attempts which the whole survival horror deal and succeed, like Alone in The Dark and Silent Hill, though the Resident Evil games mainly scared due to the very bad acting but that’s another story. (I’m sure people will argue about that whole paragraph stating other examples but just search the internet for that sort of thing if you really must) So let us enter the world of Dead Space.

Before Dead Space the game came along, the phrase “Dead Space” would have simply referred to the empty space where your brain’s meant to be. But in 2008, along came a game which basically went all out to ensure that you, your family and goldfish lose about 10 stone by providing enough fertiliser for a garden the size of China every 20 seconds.

In the original game you played an engineer named Isaac Clarke, who aside from having a brown fettage when it came to his company clothing and having a speech problem, wandered round the USG Ishimura, a “planet cracker” which people used the phrase “popped the cork” so often, you weren’t sure if was a sexual reference. It seems that some people lost contact with the ship during operations and you were sent to have a butchers and makes noises like a plumber when he’s busy calculating how much the job will cost, as well as look for your girlfriend Nicole (papa… OK, very old reference).

After boarding the ship after a wonderful crash landing, it turns out lies, treachery and deceit was afoot with human remains on the floor, lots of blood on the walls and lights flickering, creating an atmosphere of unease and severe tension.

It was like working at McDonalds on the night shift.

Not only that, there were creatures on unholy proportions unleashed all because a red marker had been brought up from the surface, which it turned out to be the missing crew. Cue various situations where the ship was sort of saved, then the evil creatures were beaten back, your girlfriend died and appeared to you as an apparition of the Red Marker, and finally the “cork” was used to wipe out the planet where all the trouble started in the first place, and we last see Issac being attacked by his girlfriend

And finally we enter the world of L’espace mort Deux or Dead Space 2 if you’re English.

It seems three years have passed since the events on the USG gruesomedeathorama and Isaac has gone a bit nuts. He’s pretty much lost everything and he now wears a wonderful jacket with big pretty sleeves all day long. But stuff happens, and once more the evil twisted creatures of the first game have been loosed upon a space station, for reasons unknown. It’s actually unreal that the game throws you then into the world while everything is going to hell, all while still wearing your straight jacket and it makes for a frankly fantastic opening.

The only question is; if you are in a mental man’s jacket and you’re running up to doors and opening them while still bound up, how the hell are you able to do so?

After a while you get free, get weapons and then your ultra sexy uniform armour and then pretty much you are a bad ass, making your way through the complex, wiping out the vicious foes as you go. Which actually is a departure from the first game, which felt more like you were just about surviving through the horrors that you were caught up in. The story goes from one point to another, and your dead girlfriend shows up constantly just to mess with your already fragile mind.

It seems that as well as just needing to live, you also need to get a cure for your head problems, as the longer they go on for, the worse it gets and if you end up at one point trying to gouge your own eye out, the overall impressions are not good.

Now after that lengthy explanation of what Dead Space is and what happens, let’s get to what Dead Space does very well. In terms of scaring the bejesus out of you at times, it succeeds very well, with various horrid creatures appearing out of walls and impaling you when clearly it’s most inconvenient but the problem is that when you happen on a large room, you kind of then know that the bogeymen are going to appear to give you trouble and to be honest, even the most horror-stricken media make you feel from time to time that you’re now safe before screwing you over again. Dead Space 2 rarely gives you a breather up in that regards.

The walking beasts themselves are something altogether horrible, which is a compliment I assure you. When we were introduced to them in the first game, just the fact that they used to be human and have been twisted and contorted into beings that only live to ensure you don’t, and even worse on some occasions transform the dead into creatures like them, only serves to heighten it all. These could have been your friends, family or prostitute that you took home to the folks just to prove that women like you.

And now you’re shooting their limbs off.

What’s worse are the obvious sick play with how children are then twisted, icons of purity and innocence, are now also walking bombs that will simply crawl up to you and explode. The cut-scene where you first are made aware of them, is just pure horror.

The controls are better than they were in the first, more responsive, probably due to the fact that it is faster gameplay, and the zero-gravity areas are way more fun due to the fact you can fly around them with little rockets on your pretty armour suit thing.

One of the strange things about all this, is the fact that Isaac talks in this game, and swears like a sailor too, but that’s forgiven due to the circumstances, let’s be fair. It’s kind of strange that in the first game he said nothing at all, but here it does at least mean that the cut-scenes with the remaining humans make a little more sense. There are a few quicktime events which are quite annoying, where basically you hammer away at a button till the game feels that you’ve knackered yourself enough to proceed forward.

Even better which make no sense are the times where glass is broken leading to the air and you being blown out into space and the only way to survive is to shoot a button at the top of the window. Given that most of this stuff would be automated, how would people just happen to have a gun to shoot the seal button to save themselves?

Oh, and on no account are the Unitologists, the nutters who are worshipping the Red Marker things which started all this off in the first place in any way like Scientologists. Honest. Please don’t sue.

And finally let’s remark on the multi-player aspect newly introduced in Dead Space 2. It’s f*king confusing as what you are meant to do, the microphone are always on which means you end up listening to various pieces of sh*t that’s supposed to be music with the final insult being basically no-one ever wins unless they work as a team, which of course no-one does.

Good ideas for the multi-player objectives though, at least they are slightly different to the usual affair.

All in all, the Dead Space series have been everything the film Event Horizon was in game form, but way more frightening, the story actually isn’t half bad, the gameplay, while repetitive is fun, more so when you are panicking and not sure what to do. It’s hard not to recommend this to anyone who is suffering from constipation.

Join us next time when we use a plunger on someone’s mouth, just to see what happens.