Dead Space makes a point of challenging video game tropes. “Unlearn the headshot” was thrown around a lot before the game’s release, and the idea made its way into the final product with screaming success. It goes beyond the initial mindfuck of encountering an enemy in a shooter and not immediately moving your laser sight up between his eyes (to punctuate this, an early encounter even has you running away from a group of enemies), as different enemies require different dismemberment strategies, and you’ll fight them all at once eventually. You’ve shot guns out of enemies’ hands and shot enemies’ feet to trip them up before, but you’ve never had to think this way when playing a shooter.

The other strongest aspects of Dead Space are its visual and auditory design. You’re mostly in corridors on a spaceship, sure, but both the character and environmental art are surprisingly and subtley unique. Space feels actually vast and empty, and scares go way beyond monsters just jumping out at you. It drips with as much atmosphere as BioShock, but feels more honest and more real.

One of the main contributing factors to Dead Space’s immersion and realism is the lack of any sort of heads-up display beyond the pause screen (which higher-ups at EA forced developer Redwood Shores to include). The problem here is that, when you think about most of the tricks they used to remove the HUD, they don’t make sense. Why would a Playstation or Xbox button symbol show up on a door on the Ishimura when Isaac nears it? Why would his health be displayed on his back? What the hell are those save stations?

Where this game really loses it, though, is in its pacing. On a small scale, it actually works incredibly well, as scary sequences flow perfectly into dead sequences, which flow perfectly into red-hot action sequences. But, on the grand scale, it’s a miserable failure. Every couple chapters, there are great moments that should keep you playing through to the end, but the stuff in between is the slog of slogs for games this generally exciting. If the game had been half as long, it would have been twice as effective.

It’s hard to come up with any more valid complaints than that, though. It’s engrossing, fun, progressive, tightly designed, beautiful, has top-tier production values, etc. etc., but it lacks that “je ne sais quoi;” a hyped-up game released in the fall needs to mean something. Halo had it. Gears of War sort of had it. Dead Space does not. Largely thanks to its pacing issues and where its story ends up going, it is forgettable.

So Dead Space is markedly progressive. Or modern, at least. It’s much like Assassin’s Creed in that respect, but the difference between the two is that, in the end, Dead Space is still an enjoyable experience. It’s hardly the next step in the lineage of its genre (so far: Resident Evil 4 to Gears of War), which is unfortunate because nothing on the horizon looks like it could be, but it’s still more worth your time and money than most games coming out this holiday season. It was clearly made with care, and by a team who knows what is up, but tripped up a few times.