Two words — strategic dismemberment. The folks at EA sure know their way into a girl’s heart. This is your primary method of defense and attack in the upcoming game Dead Space, slated for a Halloween release.

The game is set in the future, and you play engineer Isaac Clarke, average Joe. When a mining ship, The USG Ishimura, ominously loses contact with Earth after an encounter with an alien artifact, you’re sent to the ship to repair their communications system. However when you arrive, you find that the mining vessel has become a blood-soaked tomb. The crew had been infected by something alien, and the survivors have been malformed into gruesome creatures.

Although Dead Space is sometimes billed as a third-person shooter, that description is somewhat simplistic. Since you play a regular guy and not a soldier, you don’t have a lot of firearms at your disposal. In fact, you’ll often find yourself with little ammo. However, you can put your engineering skills and tools to good use. This is where the strategic dismemberment comes into play. Since you have limited ammo, you can’t just blast away freely at anything. Instead, you have to strategically dismember your enemies. Find its weak spot, then attack it.

For example in the demo, Isaac fights a Brute, a large ugly beast with thick armor. Since Isaac will waste ammo by taking it head on, instead he runs behind the Brute and shoots at its soft, unprotected legs. Later Isaac runs into a boss called a Leviathan, which kind of looks like a squishy, pulsating Sarlaac but minus the teeth, and is stretched across an entryway. The Leviathan has tentacles that try to grab Isaac, and also spits exploding pods. To beat the Leviathan, Isaac uses his line gun to lop off the tentacles, and uses telekinesis to catch the exploding pods and toss them right back.

Another feature in Dead Space is the use of zero gravity. For example during the Leviathan battle, Isaac uses zero gravity to his advantage, making it easier to avoid the tentacles and pods as he bounces from one wall to another.