A fantastic shining sequel. Nearly everything about Dead Space II is a straight improvement from its predecessor. Gunner Wright kills it as gaming's favorite fully voiced schizophrenic whos boots are heavier than ever. The enemies are more varied, and encounters are more challenging. The environments and lighting are still more than good enough to visually stand up to this day, and the scale of those environments is still awe inspiring.

Dead Space 2 was a much harder game on my first playthrough, which makes it all the more satisfying to master it and breeze through sections which before would've taken all my resources just to scrape by. Sheer fun kept me going through four consecutive playthroughs. Clocking in at around 8 hours per run in a relatively careful playthrough, this game is prime for replaying, speedrunning, challenge runs, NG+, 100%ing the upgrades, One Gun Run, etc. etc.

Like its predecessor, DS2 is really only scary on your first playthrough, when you don't know where everything is, you might not be sure what weapons you're most comfortable with, and you don't know what to do in particular situations. So I recommend that first playthrough being on Survivalist difficulty, so you get one solid playthrough of resource stress survival horror before you start bending the game backwards on repeat playthroughs, which you will.

I'm still knocking it a full star grade cause the game refused to give me my Foam Finger after I beat Hardcore.