Dead Space 2

As Isaac gets closer the circular Sprawl starts to take shape - its towering buildings standing out from one another as our hero zeroes in on one in particular. Rather than pull a chute, though, he plummets into a tunnel at the top of his target, engages his air brakes as he bangs and prangs down the inside of it, and lands, boom, inside a corridor-based shooter.

As soon as he's on his feet he's back on the move, and after moving some objects around to reach item dispensers he quickly comes under fire from some more of the game's menagerie of twisted necromorph baddies, who he proceeds to cut up with a new plasma rifle. It's still all about dismemberment, a developer yells reassuringly. Hordes of little baby-headed monsters advance through the murk and claw at Isaac's metal-clad ankles, so we put his theory to the test.

It's not all about dismemberment for the Left 4 Dead 2-inspired Puker, however. As the name suggests, he, she or it attacks by vomiting acid on Isaac from distance. If you're smart you can use this to your advantage, tempting other necromorphs into the firing line so they get burned up instead. If you're not smart you can also get caught up in the Puker's snare projectile, which temporarily restrains you.

This is particularly bad because it allows the Puker to grab Isaac, rip up his helmet and vomit repeatedly in his exposed face and mouth. It's not clear whether you can escape this fate by mashing buttons (or closing your mouth), but for the purposes of this particular demo nobody's trying to. Instead we get to see Isaac fall to his knees, throw up a lot of green nastiness, then keel over and die. Any questions?

Not quite the cautious, lumbering survival horror you remember? Dead Space 2 certainly looks more action orientated. Isaac moves faster than we remember, and players will need to think and act accordingly, blasting shutter-close buttons to avoid being ejected into space, for example, and using the environment to electrocute, ignite or - of course - dismember the necromorphs.

With that said, the game's about witnessing the spread of the necromorph infection across a brand new, bigger and more populous environment, so it follows that things would be a bit more intense than events on the Ishimura, which was already in the grip of its particular nightmare. And having established the series with the well-regarded first instalment two years ago, the studio now known as Visceral Games is unlikely to alienate its growing audience by changing tack completely.

What's more, the Sprawl's size and diversity should make for more interesting and imaginative locations - spooky, Giger-esque churches visibly among them - and Isaac's not entirely of sound mind these days either. We've yet to see how that manifests itself, but we're promised that it will before the game is done, and the effects of the marker take hold. Perhaps he'll start hearing things in space.