I liked the first game. It was a good survival horror/action title with occasionally fun puzzles and exploration, very tense atmosphere, and nice visuals. If you played it on the hard difficulty you actually had to do significant resource management too. The plot was dumb, but it was usually in the background. I liked that the story had a real resolution (even if it's "Isaac's gone insane").
Dead Space 2 fucking sucked. Almost all of the tension and atmosphere was removed, combat became much faster and spammier, the story was, although not necessarily dumber, much harder to ignore, the constant chattering of characters cut into the tension and isolation factor a lot, there were far fewer puzzles, exploration was almost totally eliminated, etc. Aside from one part where you have to do repairs on some orbital array in zero-G (or something) I thought the game was just weak as hell. Even the combat sucked, the old formula of monster closets that the first game showed restraint with was out in full force - like someone designed the game using an algorithm of "there must be X minutes of combat for every Y minutes of no combat." Also didn't help that it was even more "gamey" in that it introduced more and more gameplay contrivances without story explanation ("you found flamethrower blueprints in a preschool!").
I read up on Dead Space 3 and watched some videos. The funny thing is that the premise actually seems cool. You apparently get an open-ended section that is about 30% of the game where you explore a flotilla of abandoned warships. This section has real exploration (can go from ship to ship at will) and is fairly non-linear. The weapon crafting system, while an obvious desperate attempt to freshen up the game, also seems like it's handled decently. But apparently once that section ends, the game becomes super-linear, super-repetitive, and the quality of the gameplay just drops like a rock. They use literal copy-paste level design (you see the same rooms over and over), there are tons of pointless filler side-quests, even the graphics and polish take a nosedive. I've also heard that the ending is the stupidest thing since Mass Effect 3's, as well.
And yeah, the DLC microtransactions, freemium-style timers, etc. are just complete and utter bullshit. I just can't tell if this is purely a case of EA driving the project into the ground and obviously rushing it out the door, or if the developers themselves just ran out of ideas. And the fact that the menus look like they needed a team of 20+ people to work on for months, yet the entire second half of the game is rushed, also suggests just plain bad project management overall.