YMMV / Dead Space

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Hive Mind. It is the final boss, but is often considered easier than the Leviathan and the Space Slug. The best weapon (aside from a fully upgraded Contact Beam, which can destroy it’s weak points in one hit even on Impossible mode) is the Plasma Cutter, which you'll have been upgrading from the start, its attacks are fairly easy to dodge, and it's incredibly obvious where to shoot. The only real challenge lies in aiming while Isaac's hanging around upside down, and you'll have had practice with the Drag Tentacle. Not to mention there's a store and workbench right before the fight to sell you everything except Plasma Cutter ammo and upgrades. At the very least, it provides an awesome spectacle of a fight to end things off with.
• Breather Level: If any level could be said to be this, it is probably chapter 11; it will likely be your shortest chapter, with only a few relatively straightforward objectives to complete and only three big fights with the necromorphs.
• Broken Base: Get a large group of Dead Space players together in one room, and then immediately ask them whether or not this is one of the scariest horror games ever created. We'll wait.
• Camera Screw: The camera is fine looking all around you, but it's hard to look straight up without using the aim feature with your gun. This becomes an issue in the zero-G parts.
• Catharsis Factor: During Chapter 10, Mercer puts himself on the mercy of an Infector to turn himself into a Necromorph and, in his eyes, ascend. A quick enough player can get to the room where that is happening and kill the Infector before Mercer's transformation is done and the idea of locking him out of his ascension is quite pleasing for how much of an asshole he has been.
• Cliché Storm: An Artifact of Doom is found on a planet about to be strip-mined by a MegaCorp, and suddenly all hell breaks loose? Somehow, the engineer is better at surviving than the actual military? There's a massive Government Conspiracy about the freaky space zombies? Fun, but not exactly breaking new ground. Word of God admitted that the series is a love letter to the sci-fi and sci-fi horror genres in general.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Many people consider the Plasma Cutter the best weapon, and therefore play through the entire game using only one gun. The fact that there's also an achievement for beating the game with just the Plasma Cutter probably helps. It does good damage per shot, it can switch between wide and tall shots on the fly to more easily cut off limbs, and you can fit more Cutter ammo into a single inventory space than any other weapon except the Pulse Rifle and the Flamer. Even if you don't plan on using the Plasma Cutter, it's still a good idea to pick one weapon and stick with it, because enemies only drop ammo for weapons you have equipped. If you carry four weapons, you'll constantly be low on ammo for all of them; if you carry just one, you'll always have plenty of ammo and can even afford to sell some for extra money to spend on Power Nodes. And that means you can then use those Power Nodes to fully upgrade your one weapon easily instead of having to spread out fewer Nodes between four weapons, your suit, and your Stasis and Kinesis modules. So even if you weren't going for the achievement, it's still a good idea to use just the Plasma Cutter because of how much easier it makes things.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The Lurkers are actually dead babies that the Necromorphs have had no qualms with assimilating into their ranks. Think zombie babies are bad? Wait until you see the grapple kill Isaac uses against the Lurkers, which involves him throwing it to the floor and punting it across the room like a football.
• Goddamned Bats: Swarmers are mostly annoying... unless encountered with other stronger Necromorphs, at which point they become annoying AND threatening.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • When fighting a Brute, run down some stairs. They will turn and walk away from you. At which point you can unleash hell on them. Same happens if they're confronted by a narrow doorway, even though they have been shown to be able to completely demolish doors when the situation requires them to.
  • Necromorphs have trouble with doors. In fact most times they can't even get through an open door to leave the room they spawned in.
  • You can even use doors as weapons.
  • You can make Impossible Mode much easier by exploiting a bug. Start a New Game Plus, purchase the Military Suit and defeat the final boss. Skip the credits, don’t save your game and when you immediately start a new game, you will be delighted to see that Isaac is still in the Military Suit!
• Harsher in Hindsight: Anyone who read Dead Space: Martyr will likely cringe anytime the phrase "Altman Be Praised" is uttered since that book reveals that Altman was trying to stop the Marker's destructive influence and prevent it from being used as a weapon but he was eventually brutally murdered by corrupt EarthGov officials who proceeded to twist the events of his death into making him the martyr of their new religion centered on the Markers, the very opposite of what he was trying to achieve.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Isaac's various encounters with what he believes is Nicole, as the scenes are executed in such a way that we genuinely believe she is there.
  • Isaac is going through what amounts to a ship filled with monsters every bit as terrifying as the xenomorph despite no training and subpar weapons all because he's motivated by love. THAT is a Heartwarming Moment.
  • Hammond's attempts to help Isaac find Nicole, mission or no mission, outbreak or no outbreak.
• Iron Woobie: You'll really want to give Isaac a hug after his ordeal is over.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Unless you're playing the game for the first time, some gamers don't recommend playing on anything below Hard.
• It Was His Sled: "NICOLE IS DEAD" twist is known for virtually anyone who enjoys survival horror.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • About Isaac's Curb Stomp of DOOM.
  • Japan has one of Isaac as well: his speech. Due to Isaac not talking too much in the early games, his speech in Japan is always put after one of his iconic masks, like this: (三)>.
  • Electrontic Arts ^note An infamous typo in a folder's name the PC version of the game creates upon installation.
• Moral Event Horizon: Both Big Bads.
  • Mercer killing a bound and gagged Temple and Cross with a screwdriver to the top of the head to make it easier for an Infector to help them "ascend".
  • The entire scene with Kendra's killing of Kyne and revealing that she's The Mole.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "QUARANTINE LIFTED."
• Narm: The Hive Mind's death scene if you fail to escape it's grasp is quite horrific... Until you realise Isaac's scream as he's torn in half is an obvious stock scream. (All of Issac's grunts and screams are stock but the Hive Mind Death Screen is one of the more recognizable stock ones.)
• Nightmare Retardant: The Hive Mind. All of the previous enemies, like the ones detailed above, kept you on your toes and your gun pointed up and into the shadows of the Ishimura's bowels just in case they try something. With the Hive Mind just there when you fight it, it's not as scary.
  • At any rate, the Nightmare Fuel is restored if you simply look at the chunk of Aegis VII that's free-falling just above where you fight the Hive Mind.
• Only the Author Can Save Them Now: "Great, you fixed the engines so we won't crash. Now you have to go and shoot down all the asteroids that are about to smash us to pieces. After that, there's this giant monster in hydroponics that's screwing up our oxygen..."
• Paranoia Fuel: You will DREAD going into a room full of corpses... Not because of what killed them, mind you but because the corpses themselves might try to off you.
  • You may develop an extreme phobia of ventilation shafts from this game as well.
  • Screw that - where did all that inert biomass growing all over the walls, floors, and ceilings come from? Ordinary dust, which is made up of dead skin that has flaked off. Bet you want to dust every single surface in your house now, don't you?
  • After one of the first Necromorph encounters, you may find yourself somewhat wary of elevators.
  • The Hunter, AKA: that damn regenerating Necromorph. Similar to the SA-X from Metroid Fusion, although it lacks the magnificently tense scripted scenes. Still, just knowing it's around somewhere in the ship is quite freaky.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version of the game wasn't as bad as many other examples (the original CD version of Resident Evil 4 or Silent Hill: Homecoming come to mind), but it definitely has not held up to the test of time and has many issues with running on modern systems despite only being one and a half hardware generations old. Movement controls cannot be rebound away from WASD, v-sync locks the game to 30 fps, running the game above 60 slows mouse movement down to a crawl while breaking scripted sequences, and the antialiasing solution causes significantly blurring of the graphics, to name just a few issues. It also lacks the DLC costumes from the console versions.
• Recycled In Space: Dead Space is effectively Resident Evil 4 IN SPACE!
• Scrappy Weapon: The Flamethrower is the most common choice for the worst weapon in the game by far. The weapon does pitiful damage (being a flamethrower in a game where dismemberment is the key to victory) and is a major Master of None as other weapons do everything it can much better (The Ripper is a better close ranged weapon, the Force Gun and the Pulse Rifle are better at crowd control, and the Line Gun’s mine is a better trap). Add to that it’s voracious ammo consumption and you’ve got a weapon that’s almost completely unusable. It was so bad, in fact, that the 2023 remake completely overhauled the Flamethrower in just about every single way just to make it a viable weapon.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Compare and contrast Run Like Hell. To quote Chapter 11 of the Let's Play of DS;
  Run Like Hell follows a character in deep space, separated from his girlfriend, who's trained in medicine. The station has been attacked by a previously unknown alien race, which has massacred basically everybody. The main character's lady sometimes sends him messages to show that she's okay.
  
  The enemies, too, are quite similar. There are "Cutters", with scythe-blades for arms. There are "Brutes", who are huge, heavily-muscled berserkers who can resist massive gunfire. There are "Scouts", creatures with a scorpion tail. There are "Scout Sprites", breakaway enemies that serve as suicide bombers. There are "Elites", who can take human heads and put them atop their own bodies. And there is "Biomass", which converts the environment into an area appropriate for the aliens.
  • There is also quite a bit of similarity to the Sega Dreamcast game Carrier. In that game, set in a future where a resource crisis has caused a war, a rescue team is sent to a huge aircraft carrier that's failing to respond. The main character is one of the rescuers, who has a brother on board the ship who ends up killing himself during the course of the game. They end up trapped on the dilapidated vessel after crashing their helicopter due to a malfunctioning defense system, and discover an ancient virus, which was brought aboard as secret cargo has transformed the crew into monsters, and is steadily infesting the ship with plant matter that has to be navigated around. The main character has to fight to get off of the ship, while repairing what faults he can to keep the ship afloat, stay alive and get rescued. The central character interacts with other characters mostly through radio communication, deals with the crazed ship's doctor who has been conducting experiments with the virus, another scientist who has a religious zeal for the virus and one of the weapons available for use is a welding gun.
• Spiritual Licensee: The premise of the first game has the same general feel of Event Horizon.
  • According to some of the developers, the game was originally going to be System Shock 3, but they couldn't get the license and had to change things mid-development.
• That One Achievement: Both turret achievements are a nightmare on consoles, as noted below. It's especially bad with the asteroid achievement, in which your shields start at 85% instead of 100.
• That One Boss: The giant space slug boss at the end of chapter eight involves using the most infuriating turret system ever to defeat. You start with 100% shields. One hit from a projectile knocks 10% of your shields down. The projectiles all move far, far faster than you can turn the gun. The kicker? One of the secret achievements for the game is to defeat the boss with over 50% of the turret's shields remaining. Uh, no. This is hardly an issue with the PC version, which has the option to customize your aiming sensitivity. One wonders why the dev team didn't give console gamers a similar option, especially since most modern console shooters do.
  • The giant tentacle. Even when you're expecting it - which is only going to be because you've been killed by it already - you've got to flail around and try to shoot at the yellow spot, while the tentacle is twitching and Isaac is being dragged along, his aim (and yours) totally thrown off, as well as there being several seconds when Isaac can't fire.
• That One Level: The turret section from Chapter 4 is the worst nightmare of many who played Dead Space. It consists of Issac fixing a turret, and Hammond resets it to shoot automatically while Isaac's protecting the hull by shooting incoming asteroids. Sounds decent right? The issue comes in when its realized that the turret is not fast enough to get all of them, so you'll be turning the turret to shoot one asteroid while the another one is coming to destroy the rest of your shields and make you restart the section all over again. On the other hand, thanks to mouse control it's a total non-issue for PC Gamers, who will get through it in two or three tries at max. It comes as no surprise that this section was completely reworked for the 2023 remake.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Every single space walk in the game qualifies as this.

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