3/5 ★ – LCSnoogs's review of Dead Space.

I was never a fan of the original Dead Space. Resident Evil in space is a good pitch, but the game didn't have enough ideas to sustain its runtime. I found myself tiring of running around the USG Ishimura dismembering necromorphs. I had to force myself to finish it, and it wasn't worth seeing the credits. A few years later, I got Dead Space 2 in a Steam sale. The game ended up being so good I played it again right after beating it. It's one of my all-time favorite games. Since the release of Dead Space 2, the original game takes up the entire conversation around the series. I didn't get it. Dead Space 2 was going underrated and underappreciated leading me to hold a grudge against the first game. With EA and Motive Studios remaking Dead Space, it's an opportunity to give the game a second shot. I hoped improvements could be made to help the game shine in a way to show me what other people saw in the original. Well, I played it. I took my time. I played it at night in bed to create the optimal horror experience. I still don't get it. The Dead Space remake was starting out at an advantage. Since I didn't like the original, I didn't remember much from it. The remake was almost a completely new experience. Early on in the game, I picked up a text log detailing Isaac's backstory. The intriguing details I learned were either all new ideas from Motive Studios or information I forgot from the first game, but it grabbed my curiosity. Isaac's mother was a Unitologist. She gave away all the family money to the church. It's reminiscent of Scientology which probably was an influence for the Unitology religion. Isaac's father was an award-winning engineer who went away on a mysterious, classified mission. Both of them died under mysterious circumstances, and the Church of Unitology owns their bodies. One of the moments I remember from the original Dead Space was the big twist, I do not remember any mysteries around Isaac's parents. I dig it. It's more fuel to keep me going. Isaac Clarke is an engineer hired to by a company called CEC to help fix one of their ships the USG Ishimura. With him are three CEC members including the captain Hammond and a computer specialist named Kendra Daniels. When he arrives with the rest of the crew on the CEC ship Kellion, they find the USG Ishimura out in space next to planet Aegis VII. They try to contact the ship, but no one is answering. They attempt to board, but the tractor beam of the Ishimura malfunctions and causes them to crash in the hangar bay. As they head deeper into the Ishimura, they find it to be a ghost ship except for the hostile monsters trying to kill them. They need to get systems fixed and online to find out what happened here. The game is split up between main missions and side missions. The main missions focus on Isaac fixing the ship while Daniels uncovers the events that took place before they arrived. The side missions involve finding out what happened to Isaac's girlfriend Nicole who is a doctor assigned to the Ishimura. It's a split that makes sense. Isaac does the job he was hired to do for the main story while looking for his girlfriend on his own time in the side missions. The mystery around both had me on the hook. The remake plays around with the details of the story to deliver some surprises to players of the original game as I was hoping. I appreciate the changes, but it's never elevated higher than a solid mystery. There were two advertised changes to the game I knew ahead of time. Isaac now has dialogue after being a silent protagonist in the original game. It makes sense. He's being given a lot of orders from Daniels and Hammond. It's natural to hear him respond. Also a big part of the story is his relationship with his girlfriend Nicole. It's nice to see videos of him having a conversation with her. The other change is in how Isaac traverses the zero gravity sections of the game. In the first game, Isaac would have to jump from one wall to the next in a straight line to get around. In the remake, he has jet boosters to give him full 360-degree control of his movement through these areas. The Dead Space 2 fan in me is side-eying this. These are both features that were introduced in the sequel, and now, they are making Dead Space 1 more like 2. So now people like Dead Space 2? I remember people being upset about Isaac having an voice when the game originally released. Putting my pettiness aside, I'm not quite a fan of the execution of these changes. Isaac lacks personality. I can only describe him as "determined". He's mostly acknowledging orders. His demeanor gets more intense over time as the situation gets more out of control. There isn't enough there to give me a sense of a person. They might as well have left him a silent protagonist. As for the jet boosters, I liked the original way of getting around in the no gravity spaces. Jumping from one wall to another was actually fun in the original game, and I had never seen a game do that before. It's a shame they got rid of it. The game loses some of what made the original game unique. Progressing through the game, it does bring back one of my issues with the original Dead Space: the USG Ishimura is just dull. There's just a narrow range of look and feel in this ship. I feel no excitement when opening a new door or taking a tram to a new part of the ship because it's all the same metal bars and grating, lockers, tunnel-like hallways, and sliding doors. I used to hate backtracking back in the day, so I definitely had no patience for any of this then. This space isn't memorable. I get the Alien influence, but that ship was smaller and I only had to be in that space for two hours. Dead Space was called "Resident Evil in Space". Resident Evil, which was shorter too, had a wider range of environments: dining rooms, basements, dungeons, laboratories, art rooms, etc. Opening a door in Resident Evil made me pause for a few seconds to take it all in. In Dead Space, I keep moving looking for the loot or the fight not noticing any nuances in the rooms if there are any. I didn't notice any changes to the combat. It keeps the same dismemberment focus. Shoot off the limbs to kill the necromorphs. The tech behind it is new though, and it's impressive. The best weapon to showcase this is the Force Gun. I'm pretty sure I ignored this gun while playing the original game. It fires a force blast that knocks back the enemy while also doing damage. It's useful because most of the enemies are melee attackers and love to charge at the player. What's cool in the remake is I can see the force blast blowing the skin off the bodies of the necromorphs. It's grotesque, and I love it. I mean, realistic lighting and higher graphical fidelity is nice. They have some fun moments playing with darkness in this game, but knocking the flesh off enemies to expose the red, bloody muscles underneath is what next-gen should be all about. The downside to combat is it has balance issues. I was fine for most of the game. I even turned up the difficulty from "Normal" to "Hard" because it was too easy. As I get into the back half, the Pulse Rifle and Ripper are useless in some situations. The Pulse Rifle was noticeably weak. It's not the best weapon to use in the game as it's a standard automatic weapon in a combat system focused on cutting. I only pull it out in situations where I'm not cutting my target. One example are the necromorphs with exploding arms. They come at me with a swollen glowing arm, and when they reach me, they slam it down on me to blow it up doing massive damage. Shooting the arm causes it to explode. It's good strategy to shoot the arm when out of the blast radius because it will blow the enemy up along with any other necromorphs around it. Since it's so volatile, I expect blowing it up would only take one or two shots. It does with other weapons, but not with the Pulse Rifle. It takes five or more shots to make the arm explode. It's enough to frustrate me. Then there is the tentacle. Everyone who played the original game remembers it. A large tentacle will surprise Isaac, grab him, and pull him into the hole in the wall it came from to kill him. In order to survive, I have to shoot the swollen, glowing part of the tentacle to get it to let go of me. I died many times in a couple of encounters with the tentacle. The first was because of my lack of ammo and aim. The second time, I wasn't worried at first because I had my Pulse Rifle equipped and it had plenty of ammo. I should've worried. I died several times, and I was nailing those shots. I finally decided to switch to the Contact Beam, and I beat it first try. The Pulse Rifle is too weak to stop the tentacle. Why did they build the game this way? If only some of the weapons are good against this, just automatically equip me with one of those weapons. I ran into a similar situation with The Ripper. On the final boss, it was one of my equipped weapons. I ran out of ammo in all other weapons when the boss grabbed me for the final showdown. There's a glowing spot I need to shoot while hanging upside down. I fire ripper blades at the spot, but the blades are too slow and the boss is wiggling around too much to hit the spot. I can't go into my weapons menu to swap it out for an unequipped weapon because I can't see the menu. This game uses a diegetic menu. Pressing the menu button projects a holographic, virtual menu in front of Isaac in the environment. Isaac is too far away from me to see it, and the menu isn't even facing in a direction to make it possible for me to read it even if Isaac was closer. I died of course, and I made sure to unequip the ripper for a weapon better fit for that moment. It feels like Motive didn't give the same amount of attention to the whole arsenal. Another balancing issue shows up in the resource drops. This is a Survival Horror game. There's supposed to be limited ammo. That's not the issue here. I'm getting a lot of ammo, but it's not giving me ammo I need. If I'm running low on Plasma Cutter ammo, the game isn't making an effort to give me more. I'm just getting more Pulse Rifle ammo or Ripper blades which I have plenty of. Other Survival Horror games like Resident Evil take into account what the player has when it decides what ammo type to drop. There is a store in the game to help with this issue. In hindsight, I feel like I should've just sold all my Pulse Rifle ammo and Ripper blades, used that money to buy ammo for better weapons, and put the Pulse Rifle and Ripper in storage to never be used again, but I didn't know then the game would screw me so bad with those guns. But also, maybe those guns are secretly overpowered when fully leveled up. Which introduces another issue: the node system. Nodes are required to upgrade guns which can be found around the ship or purchased in the shop. The problem is I don't have much of a choice in which aspect of the guns I upgrade. The upgrades exist on an upgrade path. If I want to increase the damage of my Pulse Rifle, I might have to upgrade the capacity or rate of fire first if they are on the path before the damage upgrade. These cost one node each making it feel like I'm wasting nodes on upgrades I don't want to get upgrades I do. This system is in all the games, but I don't remember having such an issue with weapons and ammo in previous games to exacerbate the issue. The number one reason I hear Dead Space is better than Dead Space 2 is that the first game is scary. It's always odd to me because I didn't find the game scary at all. It's reusing the same jump scares over and over again. I walk into a room and a necromorph pops out of the ceiling or the wall or a glass tank. It never got me. The remake comes with technical improvements to lighting and sound. The enemies are more graphically detailed in their hideousness and gore. So much tech thrown at pushing the horror to the next level, and it still isn't scary. The remake has its own set of tricks it overuses. There were countless times where they grab my attention with a necromorph in front of me only to place one behind me I don't notice. They try to create creepy atmosphere with flickering lights and whispering voices. I remember there was one moment I just hear a woman scream, but no one is there. None of it gets to me other than a pause to register what I’m hearing. Early on, they play with putting the player in pitch black darkness. I had to use the light on my gun to find my path and enemies in the room. The Resident Evil 2 remake already did this, so it couldn't create the same impact. Impressive tech though. They even have a feature where I can hear Isaac's heartbeat when it elevates in response to something "scary" happening. I have no idea what they thought that would do to the player. Hearing another person's heartbeat fast doesn't affect my own. It's not like yawning. It's just an odd choice. I really tried with Dead Space, but it's still not good. The remake comes with too many frustrating decisions that overshadow any improvements in tech and story it could deliver. The flaws I remember from the original still persist here. I couldn't help but feel I was playing an inferior version of Dead Space 2. Honestly, it made me more interested in replaying the original Dead Space than replaying this remake.