The premise is that your character is an engineer accompanying an emergency repair team to fix a "planet cracking" mining ship that keeps emitting a distress signal. The scene begins with your character Isaac watching a cryptic video message from his wife Nicole (this is also the only time I've seen his face). After some dialogue, your ship crash lands onto the larger ship when something hits your vessel (that you don't see...). The team assesses the damage and since your own ship is incapacitated by the crash, you begin fixing the mining ship. After some more dialogue, you go alone to perform a task or two, and learn the basics of movement. Suddenly, you get attacked by the first monsters and are forced to run through narrow corridors to avoid being surrounded by tens of monsters without any weapons. Eventually you do find a weapon, a mining laser, and manage to regain contact with the rest of your team. The shit hits the fan when a couple of the maintenance crew go down in the first firefight. Your separation from the rest of the crew turns out to be benefitial, since the rest of the ship is in a quarantine lockdown; you can go places the other two cannot. So you end up working together to fix the ship and try to get some parts for your own smaller vessel in order to escape for later. You go through a few more objectives and then end up back at your crashed ship. After a cutscene (they all seem to be interactive cutscenes btw) the ship explodes and suddenly you and the survivors of the maintenance crew are forced to repair the ship one section at a time. To top it all off, your looking for your wife who is a medical officer stationed at the ship.
Initial Verdict: 90%
Reasons: Great graphics, excellent use of audio, and interesting gameplay (this isn't your standard fps).
Downsides: It might seem like a Doom 3 clone to gamers who don't play the game, and that can reduce the exposure the game gets with the gamer audience. Some scenes so far in this game (aside from the gore and the horror of constant dismemberment from firefights) can be disturbing, the mature label is well warranted for this title. I believe it has been banned from China, Germany, and Japan (although it will be released on November 6th in Germany uncut simply because of how awesome the game is
).
