In 2008, Dead Space was released to great critical and commercial success. The seamless blend of survival-horror, action, and cinematic beauty offered an experience that many games before it attempted to create, and many after attempted to emulate. Fast forward to 2011, and the release of the long awaited Dead Space 2. Eager to prove the series has staying power, does Dead Space 2 hit its Marker, or will it be torn apart by its inner demons?
EA has blessed us with a new trailer for the slick and incredibly disturbed looking Dead Space 2. Between trailers and gameplay videos, Dead Space 2 is giving gamers plenty to get excited about, but it is inevitable that there will be doubters. For those of us who aren't yet properly hyped for the January 25th release, EA is offering an early Christmas gift and not change your mind.
You can download the Dead Space 2 demo for your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 on December 21. I have a feeling there will be tons engineers and necromorphs being dismembered very soon.
Though not as meaty as Shadows of the Damned's Halloween trailer, Dead Space 2 reminds you that its roots lie in the blood-soaked dirt of the horror genre. The trailer also reminds you to preorder nao, as the title releases January 25th, 2011.
We had a chance to sit down with Dead Space 2 producer Zach Mumbach and ask him a little about what makes his game tick. In true developer fashion, he doesn't reveal too much, but we get enough out of Zach to make it interesting.
Before watching him play, I was able to log 10 minutes or so with the demo on the floor, which is "very close" to being an end product. I liked what I saw and enjoyed what I played, the build was polished and handled tightly. The graphics are sharp and detailed, and the environments seem to exist to haunt the player. The sterile and cramped confines of the stage I tried really messed with my head. Blood and severed limbs strewn around the floor panels should have really alerted me, but I was still rightly spooked when a necromorph burst through a panel from behind and forced me into a gruesome retirement.
The experience was topped off by entering an eerily beautiful cathedral area where I fought a boss who has a stinger with a fetus growing on it. Dead Space 2's art designers are sick sons of bitches, I love it. The stinger makes for one of the sickest death animations we saw, and you will too in the video below.
I'm very excited for Dead Space 2, which for a player should be all about ambiance. It's all fun and laughs on the Comic Con show floor, with plenty of lights and a flood of people around, but when the game releases, and it's just you in a dimly lit room with no one home, that's where the real fun begins.
EA's multiplayer reveal for Dead Space 2 looks pretty good, if not familiar. It's basically Left 4 Dead's multiplayer to a T. Remeber that mutation where gameplay was nothing but special infected versus the four survivors? Yeah, that's pretty much Dead Space 2's multiplayer.
You'll play as a band of Isaacs also known as the engineers, and face off against a collective of Necromorphs, such as the agile, close-range pouncing type, the long-ranged noxious ooze spitting type, and the portly, mid-ranged vomit type. Seem familiar? Of course not. It's not a knock, the L4D multiplayer was great fun with a band of friends, with the added gore and Dead Space's feel and story, engineers vs. necromorphs should be a blast. The objective based versus component will retain many of the gameplay intricacies from the campaign mode, so you wont feel gimped trying to take down a pack of player controlled necromorphs.
We've been assured that there will be several multiplayer game types, meaning hopefully we'll see some free-for-all deathmatches where engineers can dismember engineers. Make sure you check out GameTrailers TV for the full rundown of DS2's multi.
Dead Space 2 could be one of the games I'm looking most forward to. The game play clips we've seen thus far have just looked crazy good. The latest clip to pop up on the interwebs may not be as intense as some of the earlier footage we've seen, but it looks dope regardless. A little zero G, a little puzzle solving, then propelling yourself through the cold expanse of space dodging shrapnel so you can successfully breach a hull with your head. Awesome.
I never played Dead Space. It looked intriguing, but time and money constraints just didn't allow me to give it a shot. After I saw this Dead Space 2 gameplay demo.. Holy hell. I need to buy Dead Space and get into this series, because this sequel looks absolutely ridiculous!
Just watch it. Both parts. It's about 7 minutes of gameplay, and every second of it is worth your valuable time. Let's be honest, you're probably reading this at work or school, so I'm sure you have nothing better to do anyway. But I digress, watch it now!
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 11:20AM 
