Dead Space - ready for some Christmas chopping?

Dead Space

(EA, rated R18: PS3, Xbox 360 and PC) may be the most intense and best survival horror game yet and it's almost perfect.

It's a gruesome engrossing game that feels as if it has taken some of the best from

Resident Evil 4

,

Bioshock

, and

Doom 3

, honey-dripped it in the sweetest next-gen graphics, thrown in an AI machine and unleashed the demons.

It's intense and gory, and you can get a mild taste of it below.

Play it as I did on PS3 with a high-def TV and thunderous bass using a home theatre sound system and - with dismemberment the name of the game - it is enough to scare the daylights out of you. Don't play this game in the dark.

Few games have been this successful in creating such an atmosphere of paranoia and horror as one of the wretches hurls its dismembered body bits at you and generally scares you witless.

In this third-person shooter, you play as a space engineer who is part of a crew investigating the disappearance of a huge mining ship. His girlfriend was stationed on it, so there's a personal agenda going on as well. His ship quickly becomes history, the crew dwindles to just three and there are nasty alien creatures - that were once very human - running all over the place.

The game is straight into a hectic battle for the engineer to save himself from being eaten alive by the aliens - who tend to jump out of the darkness just when you think you're on top of the situation.

If shooting them doesn't work, the only option is to sever their limbs and leave the bloody mess behind as you head off to fight through the next onslaught. The game has a lot of atmosphere and frequently left me in a cold sweat, and that takes some doing.

It's not all brainless slaughter though, as your goal is to investigate the ship, using timely kinesis and time-slows to achieve objectives and find out what has become of the ship and its missing inhabitants.

At the store, you can buy some more powerful weapons - hang out for the 'ripper' which shoots circular saw blades and the 'contact beam' which blasts the aliens away if they come into contact with it.

EA has reinvented itself here with one of the best games of the year.

See

Dead Space screenshots here

.

MadGamer rating: 9 / 10

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

One of PS3's launch game offerings, Sony's exclusive intense vehicle racing Motorstorm, is back - this time swapping the brown desert for swampy mountainous rugged remote Pacific islands with jungle and volcanoes.

With improved competitor AI, the sequel,

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

(Sony: PS3 exclusive) has 16 multi-route tracks with the usual array of vehicles like motorbikes, race trucks and buggies and the addition of others such as monster trucks that show no mercy in beating up on you including crunching over your puny motorbike as it rolls on past.

Multiplayer options are improved including a four - player split screen option running very smoothly and multiplayer races with up to 20 players online.

The original was fun because it was so brutal and the terrain of this Pacific island makes this one fun to play but equally harder to master. The opponents jostle for position but AI improvements mean you always have carnage and it's quite fair for all.

What distinguishes

Motorstorm

from the usual off road racing games is the frenzied pace, great visuals and colours and the all around fun - plus in this version, the ability to jump between cliffs, beaches and jungle terrain, avoiding lava melting your motor and the fun of driving through impressively detailed water which also cools your engine.

See

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift screenshots here

MadGamer rating: 8.5 / 10