Dead Space

So I am about halfway through the game now and I can say without a shred of doubt that if you are a Dead Space fan, you should buy the Remake. It's fantastic, they've expanded on the original story in a compelling and interesting way whilst keeping the core story intact.

The gameplay is fast-paced and fluid, with the gunplay feeling very solid and responsive. None of the guns have useless secondary fires anymore. The Contact Beam has been reworked into something that has to be seen to believed, especially when compared to the original design and has gone from my least favourite gun to my solution to anything that displeases me.

Only issue I have is that Kinesis combat feels like it was designed for comedy purposes. I haven't had the chance to upgrade it yet, but currently, it's very easy to yeet something over someone's head and if you hit someone, one of two things happen.

They go "Oof" and shrug off the Giant Box of Death flying at Mach 5 like it's nothing, or they die and are launched at lightspeed into the furthest wall after getting panickily slapped by a disembodied foot.

So I have watched the game beforehand, as a precaution, and can safely say that if you just like shooty games with horror trappings, you will likely enjoy Dead Space remake.

However if you loved Dead Space 1, you should probably skip it. The game now feels, like I mentioned, like a mildly spooky shooter, rather than the tense, harrowing experience of original. The new zero-G sections add absolutely nothing of value (a common thread with most of the additions now that I think about it), and, in fact, seem to make the old equivalent parts somehow worse due to poor translation and very lacking map design (in case of "new" areas).

The story changes are a whole 'nother can of worms and without gointg into too fine a detail, Isaac just won't shut up about the most inane things, will babble out the solution to every puzzle you encounter, and yet will happily ignore without a remark things he would need to comment to stay consistent with the new him. Remixed character encounters seem invariably worse though the major death obnoard the other spaceship felt the absolute stupidest cop-out possible frankly, reeking of forced drama.

The alt-ending sucks ass and breaks canon with both old DS1 and DS2 at the same time.

Oh yeah, a certain doctor now has a magical stasis gun that works entirely differently of any other occurence of stasis, and that is only so that he can monologize about how he eats babies for breakfast. It's pathetic cop-out on writer's part really.