I'm going to say that at 12 hours, Dead Space 3 is far and away my favorite of the series. I can definitely see ways in which the experience could deteriorate from here, though. I've heard a lot of people complain about reused architecture and stuff, which I can understand being annoying, especially given the military-bunker motif. But it also would make sense. I don't expect to see a lot of variety in that sense because this is a military base constructed quickly by a less technologically-advanced society, it's going to be utilitarian in nature or it would seem out of place.
As for the story... I don't know where it veers for so many to find it so inadequate, but I'm totally into everything that's happening so far. Definitely wanting to know more and continuing to drive on.
As for the horror... I find this to be entirely on par with the original game. Dead Space had a spooky and very tense atmosphere that was particularly great when it was actually scary, which was in a select few spots. It relied a lot on gore for much of this, then with environment here and there. Dead Space 2 was not scary. At all. Spooky and atmospheric, but I find Dead Space 3 to feel much less like an action game than DS2 did, especially toward the end. The enemy counts are definitely higher now, but that's in large part I suspect to make up for the overabundance of ammunition and the differences in the overall progression/save/inventory design. And I guess for co-op as well. But yeah, I find the horror aspect alive and well and have no fucking idea why everyone is bitching so much about that. This is a far more potently atmospheric game than DS2 and the fact that it actually builds little stories to ground you to the events gives everything so much more impact. Instead of a series of emotionless firefights against spooky monsters, OH NOES, now you've got the sense of people who were trying to survive things, or who were tricked into their deaths, betrayed, eaten, etc. I'm way more impressed with that stuff here.
The detail is remarkable. The way you can piece together bits of the story without being told, all the little clues about things left in the environments, the cool sense of distinction between the soft future-fiction designs of Clarke's time and the hard industrialism of the distant future-past. I also love how even though many of the enemies are the same or similar to past games, the designs are totally different to reflect the different fodder the necromorphs were born from.
I haven't found the characters irritating or the dialogue unbelievable. I don't know why people have made such a big deal about that (again, as with all this, unless it really and truly tanks later). The love triangle is a little forced, but trust me, it doesn't matter how close to the end of the world you get, two guys fighting over a girl are always going to act stupid. And I don't find this aspect played up at all so far, it only rears its head a couple times, and mostly in the context of giving these two guys more reasons to disagree beyond just looking at the situation itself, causing you to mistrust their motivations. And that works fine.
So yeah, thus far I'm loving the ice planet (just came across the big installation, with that huge wow-moment sunrise, but haven't explored it, and did the creepy basement with the starving creatures, then the surplus-area side mission), I loved everything set in the flotilla, I think the game is plenty horrory despite being a bit more action-focused and opened up, the crafting system is addictive and awesome and I keep playing around with it (which is great since I never, ever felt compelled to use guns outside my comfort zone in the first two games, but getting new parts here makes me want to try stuff out), and the story at least so far has been very compelling and setting up lots of potentially cool ideas. The game would have to take a major fucking nosedive out of nowhere at this point for me to not call this my favorite of the three, and I already basically played the equivalent of one of the other games content-wise, so I'm really not going to complain if some of the latter section is a touch worse, provided that it isn't too much worse. And of course we'll have to see where the story goes.
Really curious to see how this all develops. I wonder if this is one of those many cases where modern reviewers turn into utter sheep because they can't bear to deviate from popular opinion, or if things actually do get considerably worse from here.
