Saturday Morning Gaming: Dead Space Remake Review

We talked about the main plot of the game last week:

It’s a tight-perspective 3rd person survival horror game set on a mining spaceship, mostly. Think “Resident Evil 4 on the ship from Event Horizon”. You play Isaac Clarke, an engineer who has been called in to fix the mining ship Ishimura and, of course, it is crawling with space zombies. One of the things that makes the game awesome is that you are mostly using tools to fight against the zombies rather than guns (yes, there are guns but they aren’t as effective against the zombies as your trusty Plasma Cutter, the Line Gun, or the Ripper).

Dead Space is a game set up in chapter form. Each chapter could well be named “NOW WHAT?”

Like, the first thing that happens in the game is that your rescue/repair ship crashes into the docking bay of the Ishimura. The news never gets better from there. Then you find out that you have to turn the main computer on. Then the first thing that the main computer reports is that the ship is in a decaying orbit. Okay, let’s fix the decaying orbit. Oh, now we’re in an asteroid field and the anti-asteroid targeting computer needs to be recalibrated. Okay, we’ve done that… now there’s a problem with the air quality? OH JEEZ NOW WHAT.

My main complaint about the game last week was that they made a significant change to turn the protagonist from a silent one to a guy who has a voice actor who engages with other people and makes his internal monologue explicit.

But they changed a lot of other things and I’m surprised to find myself saying that most of those other changes weren’t bad?

Like the anti-asteroid computer. In the original 2008 game, what you needed to do was find and reboot the computer and you had to take over the asteroid guns while the system was rebooting. At that point in the game, the game shifted and changed gameplay mechanics. It stopped being a Resident Evil game and became almost an old-school arcade game where you shot the ships guns at incoming asteroids. Survive for a minute! Okay, the computer rebooted, back to playing Resident Evil In Space.

The way the game handles it now is that you have to recalibrate the system yourself. You have to go outside, into outer space, hook up to the computer, and then point the tool in your hand at the incoming asteroids and tell the system “shoot things like this” enough times. Do it before you run out of oxygen. Do it before too many asteroids hit the ship. While you’re doing something different than “running around” and “shooting zombies”, the basic mechanic of the game is the same: You’re in a tight-perspective 3rd person game.

This has the surprising outcome of turning the asteroid section from “oh, we’re changing mechanics” to “AAAAAAAAAAAAH WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE” and that is a very nice change.

Now, without getting into spoilers for the rest of the game, I’ll say that this isn’t the only section that makes a change like this one. And I’m even more surprised to say that the changes made the game better. (Well, there’s one section that involves satellite dishes and the signal theory was better in the original game than it is in this one, but I’ll let that slide.)

I find myself surprised to be playing a remake of the original that is actually *BETTER* than the original.

(I still wish that they kept Isaac a silent protagonist, though.)

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the absolute best moment in the game: Finding a node. Screenshot taken by the author.)