Final Thoughts
Dead Space 3 might be a direct console port but it's done right, at least as far as I can tell after a few hours of gameplay. From memory the original Dead Space felt like a very sloppy console port, I remember struggling to play more than a few minutes due to poor mouse control. For that reason I never gave the second instalment much of a chance, so I don't have much to go on there.
The PC version of Dead Space 3 doesn't suffer from any such input issues and in fact plays very well. The game might not have DirectX 11 features or a high resolution texture pack, but I personally found it to be quite enjoyable.
Something this game should be commended for is the new co-op drop-in/drop-out feature which the developer went on record as saying was "shockingly difficult" to implement. The story has to be flexible enough to accommodate both series heroes, Isaac Clarke and tough guy John Carver in the same scene whether one person or two people are in the game simultaneously.
Few games offer this, so Dead Space 3 does have that going for it.
For gamers that have built cutting edge rigs to play recently released titles such as Far Cry 3 in all of their glory Dead Space 3 will fail to impress. However, for everyone else the good news is that Dead Space 3 can be played with everything turned up at the Full HD resolution and still receive highly playable performance on this generation's mid to low-end GPUs.
For $150 the GeForce GTX 650 Ti had no trouble averaging over 50fps at 1920x1200. This means previous generation mid-range graphics cards and even those from the generation before it won't have a problem playing Dead Space 3.
Overall, Dead Space 3 appears to bring enough reasons to impress fans of the previous two titles. The drop-in/drop-out co-op feature is innovative and adds an extra dynamic to the game. Graphics are sub-par for a new PC game release, there's no denying that, but gameplay may allow you to forget all about it if survival horror shooters are your thing.