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Dead Space 2 - Multiplayer

Grate expectations.

The Lurker, finally, can climb walls, which is handled pretty smartly with the stab of a face button when you're in position. Once installed on the ceiling, Lurkers can start to rain down death from the darkness.

After all that it might seem hard to get excited about playing as a mere human, but Visceral's tried to sweeten the deal. There's an excellent range of weapons, drawn from the single-player game, to mess around with, and you'll be able to customise your loadout before going into battle.

You'll also have a quick heal option at your disposal and, adding another tactical layer, it's an area effect - meaning if you can catch team-mates with it, you'll give them a bit of a boost too.

Then there are the objectives you'll be tasked with. These are tied directly to the game's five maps. Five may not seem a lot – actually, it isn't a lot – but the two shown so far make up for that to some degree through sheer thoughtfulness. Solar Array is a riddle of claustrophobic walkways you'll have to navigate in order to get the area's power back online. Titan Mines is a little larger – a cluster of corridors leading to a central plateau where your mission is to put together a bomb to wipe out the alien incursion.

You'll do this by standing near bomb-part spawn points long enough for them to open up, then lugging the components back to an assemblage area. All while nasty little babies and many-legged monsters will try to hurt you at every step.

The pace of combat feels like it's been stepped up a little bit for the multiplayer and while the focus is still on strategically lopping bits off your rivals, the Necromorphs seem to bust apart a little quicker.

One dynamic the game already has a lot of fun with is forcing human players to decide whether to stay together and sacrifice speed for safety, or whether to split up and try and get the objective sorted before the aliens can bash out a proper strategy. It makes for multiplayer with a real sense of tension.

A final balancer sees teams swapping factions after each round anyway to ensure that the supply and demand of humans and aliens is always in check. There's also an experience points system that seems to be universal: your points are tied to your account, by the looks of it, and open up weapon and perk unlocks for each faction depending on who you're playing as.

Multiplayer Dead Space is still an odd concept, but it's pleasing to see it working this well already. If Visceral can keep the maps coming post-release and listen to the community when the inevitable balancing issues erupt, the developer could be sitting on top of a satisfying, effective alternative to Call of Duty.