The game is iconic but suffers from the drawbacks of early FPS games with some flaws that are hard to forgive (nostalgia destroyer ahead):

• the usual "difficulty by attrition" by making ammo scarce is just a deterrent to engagement that will just lead to "tedium" instead of "challenge" by forcing the player to backtrack to stores, avoid areas completely and/or mobs and generally not follow a flow of the game but rather pace to ensure that they do not die,
• following the "difficulty by attrition" there is a full upgrade tree for all weapons, utilities and the armor as well, but with very few "upgrade nodes" (currency that need to be expended to upgrade), as well as one-way upgrades where the nodes cannot be removed, which also has the effect of making the player prioritize and be conservative instead of enjoying the game with all assets; the game seems to realize the lack of nodes and tends to hand more nodes to the player at the later stages in the game, but, regrettably, that is too late and learning how to play the game will enable any player to just finish the entire game just with the first basic gun,
• the levels vary in difficulty and some later levels seem to be easier than earlier levels, mostly depending on the disposition of the level and how mobs are being spawned; while that is a good design as opposed to just linearly increasing the difficulty (as a foreseeable trope), the problem is that there is no way to switch the difficulty up or down in case the player gets stuck,
• the necromorph variety is mostly lacking with the mobs initially scary and dangerous but very early on in the game all the mob types get accounted for, along with their patterns, leaving the player to express "oh, now it's that one" instead of actually being bothered by the atmosphere or being afraid or feeling challenged by the game,
• the progression of the game is highly linear, consisting mostly in riding some joy-train to various stops on the way, where the player must get out and fix some issue with the ship and no matter the complexity of the level, after the job is done, the player will have to backtrack and take the station to the next point where there will be "something else to do",
• the game length is too much and should have been shortened in order to not get boring or tedious, particularly given the overly linear design of the game that forms the game cycle,
• even though the engine and the setting is sound, there are many opportunities where the game could have been made more interactive; for example, every time the player meets one person that is still alive, they die a moment thereafter and it would have been much more engaging to actually join the player for a given distance and fight alongside them (ie: like Metro),
• there is a looming perpetual tribute being paid to the Alien franchise, and while that is cute, the necromorphs that the player fights are way less frightening than Xenomorphs, at best the necromorphs seem like random zombies and all of them fall into the stereotype of attacking you with their limbs; similarly, face huggers with heads where the body should be, creatures on the wall where tentacles sprout of them instead of Xenomorphs, it's all good, but there is no need to be just that tributary to the Alien franchise,
• the PC version has console-like controls, extremely janky and difficult to use, with the perspective being stuck at "almost 3rd person" (ie: the camera just off the shoulder), no possibility to adjust the field of view (FOV) except by hacking the game with Cheat Engine (for a basic feature that is a slider in other games, which is bad), and for some reason that some might justify with the weight of the armor, Issac the protagonist the player is playing moves extremely slow that in many situations no distinction can be made between "running" and/or "walking",
• the bad controls are so bad that they also impair tactics, for example, the player cannot open a door if they happen to be aiming, which is more or less a standard procedure when opening up rooms,
• the story seems to be a bit cliche and mostly annoying due to Issac (the player) just being remotely instructed by everyone to "do stuff", making the player feel as if they're doing absolutely everything while the others just sit around and chit-chat over the comms,
• the game could be renamed to "limb cutting simulator" because everything in this game has to be killed by shooting off its limbs (for some reason) going as far as to contain mobs, like the big belcher mobs with small critters inside, that explicitly do not have to be shot in the torso or they release smaller mobs; the emphasis on shooting limbs is just disturbingly weird contrasted to other games where the more common headshot leaves the best mark,
• to add injury to insult, the game has serious hit-scan issues such that shooting directly at the limbs of some mob sometimes ends up in perpetual misses with the player discharging an entire cartridge or at times the limb is cut directly with only one single shot; perhaps the best exponent of this issue is the heaviest weapon in the game, the contact beam, that similar to other buggy FPS games will shoot projectiles that explode yet deal no damage as it would be expected

The following is a completed game save file for Dead Space (not the 2024 Dead Space remake but the original game):

• ds_slot_08.zip

the save game file unlocks the "impossible mode" along with some bonus extras, such as credits and others.

This game is extremely easy is if you understand the simple rule that any mobs should be exclusively shot in the limbs (excluding the head) and that any other target will simply not cause any significant damage.

Even when dealing with mobs never met before and that might look like they do not have limbs, just try the extremities, tentacles, ropes, etc., instead of trying to core head-shots or shooting the centre mass.

Having said that, even the most basic weapon, the plasma cutter, with its extremly low fire rate can be used to complete the entire game. It's either shooting off limbs, or some puzzle-scripted boss where the weak points are already highlighted for you.

Necromorphs that are attached to the wall are very misleading in terms of how they can be killed. The impulse is to headshot, to shoot the large belching belly or to shoot the hole in their chest but all those points do absolutely nothing in terms of damage.

The key is to shoot the tentacle tips, and even with just 1 shot, the tentacles will just rip off.

Alternatively, with the right timing, a flammable canister can be thrown at the necromorph right before engaging in battle and it might explode and blow off all the tentacle tips at once, which is what the video clip is meant to illustrate. Incidentally, the game tends to place flammable canisters right in the proximity of wall necromorphs so more than likely this is the way they are meant to be killed.

The arena is an area where the game locks the player in a large corridor and starts to spawn various types of mobs leaving the player little room for escape. Intuitively, the scene should be played by running and gunning but there is a small game anomaly that will allow the player to easily survive the sequence.

Judging by the quest indicator, the player is supposed to follow the path through the very same door that they entered the scene, and the trick is to hug the left-most wall right at the entrance without advancing, on the opposite side where the game expects the player to be. It might be a small pathfinding exploit, but it looks like the mobs are confused about where the player is and just go back and forth between the two lanes separated by pillars which allows for enough time for the player to pick them off one by one.

The game does its best even on the standard "Medium" difficulty setting to provide the player with sufficient ammo. However, it might just so happen to run out of ammo. One solution is to exploit the game spawning / despawning cycle in order to avoid consuming ordinance.

A good example is the wall necromorph that spawns a bunch of smaller aliens with a single tentacle from time to time up to filling an entire room with them. Instead of wasting ammo to kill all of them, one solution is to simply backtrack because after a sufficient distance, the game will despawn the mobs.

Lots of mobs and useless fights can just be avoided that way by ignoring them, slowing them down, running past them and through to the next door. Doors are somewhat special in the game in that they seem to fence in mob pathways such that even if the player is standing close to the door to a room, some mobs inside the room might just end up avoiding the player completely or if they come close tot the door, turning around, going inside the room again and not pursuing.

Another ammo retention tactic is to shoot off the limbs of corpses due to one mantra-like mob being able to reanimate dead bodies into necromorphs but will also avoid corpses without limbs.

Interestingly, and perhaps connected to ammo retention, more experienced players might have the impulse to not purchase any weapons other than what is necessary on the premise that ammo is scarce and hence spreading out is a bad idea. However, the game seemingly dumps ammo according to the weapons that the player possesses, such that, counter-intuitively to prioritization games, the ideal tactic is to just purchase every single weapon within the store and that also becomes a way to avoid running out of ammo.