4) You can use the force

Ok, fine, that's a lie - there aren't any Jedi in Dead Space. There's just you and a sprawling starship full of patchwork monsters made of mangled former crew members. Oh, and your arsenal of techno-gadgets that allow you to manipulate large objects from a distance and slow things to a virtual halt with a powerful stasis field. It's not the force, though, its science (fiction).

Whatever you want to call it, the point is that you can slice off a Necromorph's (pictured right) leg/arm/gut, grab it with telekinesis and shoot his face off with his own appendage. Games like Half-Life, Bioshock and, err… Star Wars have similar tools, but it's still frickin' cool.

5) Your enemies can go places you can't

Why do characters in horror games inevitably have to crawl through a vent? It seems like it would be worth taking the time to find a different way to go if there are face-eating monsters around. Maybe it's the heavy space engineering suit or maybe just common sense, but the Dead Space protagonist, Isaac Clarke, just isn't going to do that kind of thing. That still won't stop the monsters in the ship from crawling through every tube, pipe and vent in the ship.

Above: This will happen to you 

In a very unscripted way, the enemies in Dead Space are likely to crawl along the walls and climb into places you can't fit. They know how to get around and how to climb through the walls and get behind you, making it that much easier for them to scare the heck out of you.

6) There's an actual story

It's true that you do play a quiet guy with a gun and a fancy helmet, but under the mask's green LED eye slits we've been told there's a man - a man named Isaac Clarke, and he's got an entire life story in the world of Dead Space. More than that, the development team has created an entire fictional universe behind him. The real story of the game begins over 500 years before the opening sequence, and every major character has a personal history, whether you discover it or not.

Above: There's a whole world out there… well, it's missing one piece 

We won't get into specifics on the history of the universe or plot of the game, since we don't want to give it away before you play. You'll have to wait until October, when Dead Space will be released, and fill in the gaps with the upcoming comic and cartoon.

All three properties are based on Executive Producer Glen Schofield's twisted vision. With so much material to draw on, we're hoping for the Dead Space universe to be at least as good as the Doom movie. We just hope the game doesn't end up having the expectation that everyone has the time to read a novel before playing the game - see reason number four. 

Here's a look at the developers talking about the story in Dead Space:

Aug 8, 2008