Zero-G repair sections are delightfully disorientating as you boost around open spaces with your rocket boots, necromorphs floating and flailing at you in the gaps. Scenes where Isaac is cast into a ravaged part of the ship -walls torn apart, oxygen absent and the black maw yawning beyond- are rarely as imminently dangerous as they feel the ticking clock of your O2 as he struggles past crumbled bulkheads is anxiety-inducing stuff. The game has always had a knack for using the latter in its gameplay. I can somewhat take or leave its tale of religious fanatics (given a deeper presence here, along with a now fully-voiced Isaac), but its descent into madness as you witness some of the ‘surviving’ crew members doing terrible things and the suffocating oppression of space itself win out. But Dead Space still manages to be panicked in its combat and, at the very least, unsettling in its exploration. Familiarity might be a factor in this case, but I feel I haven’t been properly frightened by a video game horror in some time (recommendations on a postcard, or in the comments). It’s not perfect and the occasional boss battle -glowing weak points and all- can be clunky wars of attrition, but the combat encounters through the ship make a solid base for the game.īut it is the trip around the Ishimura itself that offers the most interest. Both instances have their own kind of thrill. But just as often you are clumsily blasting plasma past the thin, swaying claws and desperately stomping and the monsters gnashing at your feet as they look to overwhelm. In your best moments, you will chop off limbs, slow down an approaching beast with stasis before using your kinesis module to hurl a sharp, severed limb and pin them to the wall. The remake has brought in some extra weaponry ideas from Dead Space’s sequels, with effective alternative fire modes on guns such as the pulse rifle and flamethrower, but the core remains the combination of dismemberment, crowd-control and using Isaac’s gadgets. The fights can be either breathlessly panicked, or perfectly executed depending on your ammo levels and just how many monsters have burst through vents behind you. They serve as a health bar on the zombies as tendons and gristle start to fray before another hit lops the limb off completely. The focus of the game’s combat remains removing body parts, with the flesh now sloughing off limbs as they are hit with Isaac’s trusty plasma cutter. The necromorphs are spindly, Carpenter-esque creations and now have a more tangible (and disgusting) appearance. And one that the remake takes advantage of by carving in some extra rooms and side-missions as Isaac works to repair the ship, find his partner Nicole and discover just what’s up with the rest of the crew turning into skittering, sharp-clawed monstrosities. It is seamless now too where the limitations of the time saw the original carve its areas into stage-based sections, here you will loop around and return to areas until you start to develop an understanding of the layout. This was true of the original but it has, naturally, never looked better. But for the horrors unfolding, you might even believe the Ishimura as a place to live and work in the depths of space. The warren-like, tram-linked corridors make for a disorientating but authentic place. The crash-landing is a stomach-flipping pirouette and, once inside, the guts of the ageing spaceship are a blend of rusted, busted engines, perilous walkways and pristine holographic screens. As engineer Isaac and his crew approach the Ishimura on an apparent repair mission, its brutalist angles cut across a glittering galaxy, light glinting off its hull. So why the glow-up? Besides, perhaps, to get the Dead Space name fresh in the mind again? It certainly lets Dead Space’s monolithic ‘planet-cracker’ setting, liberally inspired by Event Horizon and Alien’s Nostromo, shine. It’s been 14 years since the original game, which is somehow more horrifying than anything the game could possibly throw at me, but it was made with a forward looking mentality and has held up admirably. The return of Dead Space is confidently the latter rebuilt from the ground-up with new technology, but faithfully revisiting Isaac Clarke’s first encounter with toothy ‘necromorphs’ and his own mental trauma on the sprawling spaceship USG Ishimura. In an era of hardware able to do fleshy monsters and flickering darkness a horrible justice, developers have turned to past successes to either inspire ( The Callisto Protocol) or remake (Resident Evil 4, System Shock). No doubt buoyed by Capcom’s tremendous Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019, the revival of the solo survival horror has become a welcome vogue for video games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |