If you like the idea of being stuck alone in a space ship, thousands of miles away from anything, with horrible terrible thins happening all around you and weird creatures trying to kill you - basically, Event Horizon with tentacle monsters - then you might be interested in Dead Space.

Coming from EA later this year, Dead Space has you playing an engineer sent in to investigate the mysterious loss of contact with a massive mining space ship. Upon arrival, the aforementioned tentacle monsters are discovered and, somewhat unsurprisingly from this point, all hell breaks loose and you're thrust into a third person bloodbath as you try to stay alive.

Being a simple mining engineer - as opposed to a Space Marine or Interstellar Delta Force or some other futuristic warrior caste, as might be expected - you're in this situation without the usual deadly arsenal. Fortunately, being a particularly enterprising and innovative type, you've figured out a way to turn your mining tools to your advantage, so you're not completely helpless - you've got a variety of projectile weapons, as well as something called a TK Gun, which is preeeeeeeetty much the same thing as Half-Life 2's gravity gun.

Now, the projectile weapons are interesting as they have a few different fire modes - for example, allowing you to fire several shots simultaneously in a horizontal or vertical line. The reason for doing this becomes immediately clear when you start thinking about tentacles - often you'll need to chop alien beasties apart piece by piece before you can dispatch them.

This is, of course, gruesome, not to mention awesome. However, dismemberment often isn't enough to save the day - even knocking an alien head right off the shoulders might not take them down, so there's a lot of wading around knee-deep in blood trying to figure out the best way to make sure these creatures stay dead.

The gravity gun clone also has the unique ability to wrap enemies in a "statis field", essentially slowing down their movements. This is particularly handy when fighting some of the big bosses; slowed down its much easier to get into a position where you can lop off limbs.

Now, it might sound like a typical mindless action game - it has lots of great action components - but there's a really, really strong focus on atmosphere and, well, scaring the shit out of you. Even playing in a noisy environment with people everywhere it was still a pretty intense experience - like Doom 3 though, if you play this game with the lights out alone on a big screen, you're going to need to put down newspaper first. Shades of Event Horizon freakiness.

The similarity to horror movies is more than superficial - there's a bunch of great cinematic moments in the gameplay that add really add to the intensity. For example - at one point in the demo level I was playing a massive squid arm comes out of the wall and grabs you, dragging you feet-first down the corridor into what we can only assume is a horrible horrible death. Fortunately it hasn't got your arms, so you can try to shoot it apart while you're being dragged along. Excellent camera angles and the sheer shock of it make it a pretty insane experience.

Another cool feature is the addition of zero gravity scenes. There's no jetpacks or any other magical way to navigate in zero-g - you basically just leap from one point to the next and hope you don't get wiped out while floating through space. Any objects that are dislodged or thrown about just bounce around the environment; one of the coolest moments in the game I played was opening a door to a zero-g environment to be greeted by a floating human head just spinning slowly around some other dismembered parts.

Another interesting innovation is the lack of a conventional heads up display. In a move clearly designed to increase immersion, all of the usual indicators, such as ammo and health, are integrated directly into your characters outfit, and externally on the weapons in the form of an LED display. A little weird at first while you adjust to looking in the different places, but definitely helps the overall mood of the game.

The learning curve to get into the game is pretty light - I found myself grappling a little bit with the gravity gun and the stasis field thing at first though, just trying to get a handle on how to deal with those in addition to the normal array of weapons. I think I was plunged pretty directly into the action, so I suspect as you're going through the first stages of the game you're introduced to everything a little more gradually - but even jumping in cold it was pretty easy to get to grips with.

Now, there's no multiplayer, so all the emphasis is on making the single player game. Our hands-on time with the game definitely shows that things bode pretty well for those gamers looking for a good combo action/horror title. Spectacularly gruesome visuals, spooky atmosphere and some great cinematic moments combine effectively to create an engaging experience. Watch out for more on this as the marketing blitz starts very soon!