
The two-player co-op is all run through Origin, which believe it or not, is actually a fairly smooth system for inviting friends to play. You aren't likely going to have any trouble running Dead Space 3, especially if you've played the previous two. Running on my Core i7 CPU and GeForce GTX 570 videocard, FRAPS reported my framerate at over 100 at maxed-out settings during my first hour of play. There's definitely no framerate cap in effect here. However, I'm unable to skip some cutscenes, which is some powerful stupid in a game with checkpoint saves. Everything's clickable with no problems, and the in-screen holographic menus that Dead Space is famous for work as well here as they ever have. DS3 will auto-detect when a gamepad is plugged in and change the on-screen prompts on the fly, so you don't have to go into the menu to change a setting.

Plus there are standard options to invert the X or Y axis, and adjust the sensitivity, though there is no mouse acceleration toggle. Keys are fully customizable, with only a few exceptions (such as the tilde key). Most of the differences between quality settings we're seeing here are lighting and shadows, which in a dark game like this make a huge difference. And of course, there are full resolution options.Īnd aside from the muddy texture quality, Dead Space 3 doesn't look bad in action. As a welcome surprise, it does offer a borderless full-screen windowed mode for super-smooth alt-tabbing - I wish more games would do this. We're notably missing a field-of-view adjustment, but since this is a third-person shooter, that's not as big of a deal as it would've been with a first-person game.

Vsync (on/off), bloom (on/off), glow (on/off), depth of field (on/off), SSAO (on/off), screen space reflections (on/off), blur (on/off), post processing (on/off), motion blur (on/off), flares (on/off), distortion (on/off), light quality (two options), light accumulation (two options), decals (on/off), anti-aliasing (five options), shader quality (three options), shadow quality (six options), anisotropic filtering (up to 16x). In fact, if not for the lack of a texture-quality selection this would actually be a reasonably good list of options: For all the crap it's gotten for being a bare-bones port, Dead Space 3's PC graphics options aren't that terrible.
