Dead Space; an adventure through space hell. A alien parasitic life form has transformed the majority of crew members of the USG Ishimura into violent, monstrous mutations. Where the only hope of survival is one of the crew members, an engineer, Isaac Clarke. Conserve ammo and med-kits and attempt to repair crucial parts of the ship to find a way off it. Melee ability is limited, a weak human can only hope to knock these creatures back long enough to reload or run. They are highly resistant to normal organ damage, there weakness is dismemberment. Severing just their head isn't enough.
Momentarily scaring someone isn't the same as "psychological dread", in order to scare someone psychologically it has to have a lasting impact. This is the issue the pervades Dead Space. For what it gains in building strong atmosphere, immersive 3rd Person by keeping the camera very close to Isaac and having no actual hud elements, instead what little hud you get is in the form a 3d dimensional hologram display on your gun & inventory menu and vertical health bar on his spinal column. All this is almost completetly lost after an hour or so of gameplay. The atmosphere and mystery around the story keep you in suspense, which adds to the impact of the jumpscares at first.
However because you kill so many enemies they start to become extremely predictable, and theres no build up to the scares (except for a few instances, mostly early on in the game) and the game even telegraphs the scares on a semi-often basis by flickering the lights, doors shutting or when it becomes very quiet all of a sudden.
Its this lack of subtletly that turns it into a Americanised B-Movie schlock gorefest that we see taking up all the space in video stores... except in a sci-fi setting.
Thats a shame! Because it has loads of potential, its got inspiration from The Thing in the enemy design for sure. The story once it starts to talk more about the bigger picture is really just the standard stuff we've heard all before.
+Atmosphere
+Visuals
+Sounds are nice quality
-story
-silent protagonist
-horror isn't upto par unless you think of it as gore horror.