New fans will enjoy a scary action adventure over the shoulder shooter with lots of cool guns. Fans of the franchise will need to look elsewhere for that big scare. I love it and hate it at the same time.

I'm very proud of what Visceral Games has made with the third main entry in DS's franchise. It stil has got the atmosphere that we loved in the two previous games and it's as scary as the second.

It's an unfortunate side effect of today's industry that almost every one of our favourite franchises we enjoyed in our youths is being butchered or shaken up to the point where it barely resembles what it originally started off as.

Dead Space 3 is a terrifying journey that you will embark on as Engineer Isaac Clarke, who once again gets drawn into piecing together the mysteries of the Marker and will now need to face the horrors of the frozen planet of Tau Volantis to discover the truth and stop the plague of Necromorphs.

The Dead Space series is renowned for its inventive approach to the survival horror genre. Amongst the crowded shooter market, Dead Space found its home as a great horror series. It originally found its reputation through the amount of tension established during its missions.

While the buzz surrounding the game brought fear to a lot of the series' veteran players over the past few months, I'm happy to report that the final product is a near-perfect balance of classic Dead Space and action-oriented gameplay.

Isaac Clarke suffers reversals of fortune with such speed and regularity, it's like it is bound to some sort of wheel. A wheel... of... fortune. His reversals get reversed, he climbs to the top of a mountain only to be thrown back down - he's a representation of the Buddhist philosophy that life is...

Dead Space 2 , however, blew me away. I don't know if it was the increased variety from a raw gameplay standpoint, or the more interesting locales, but Dead Space 2 had me hooked.

Dead Space 3 was simultaneously building up a big hype and setting itself up for a fail in the months preceding its release. With all of EA's money behind it, Isaac Clarke and his trademark plasma cutter was plastered on advertisements all over the world, just begging to be mainstreamed to death and...

● Great atmosphere ● Side missions are a winner ● Weapon crafting has been implemented well

● Quite easy for experienced gamers ● Microtransactions (optional; yes; an eyesore; yes

The main reason Dead Space 3 isn't as scary as its forebears is that Isaac is tooled up to the nines. The original Dead Space did enough to keep the tension up, but it's difficult to call it pure horror when your protagonist wanders around in an armoured onesie wielding a plasma weapon.