Deadspace is easy to distill down to its influences. Take the gameplay from Resident Evil, the atmosphere from Aliens, the spacestation from System Shock, and add some enemy design elements stolen from John Carpenter's The Thing, and you have everything that makes Deadspace tick. Despite not being original, Deadspace does its haunted-house in space thing very well, so well, in fact, that there's not a whole lot to complain about in this new remake. The original came out in 2008; since then, there have been a whole lot of graphical advances, and Deadspace puts them to work. The lighting is top-notch, with excellent use of shadows and flickering ambient illumination that periodically brightens the deep darkness. This is the darkest game I've played since Doom 3, and that's a good thing. I played it on a VA monitor with a pair of good headphones, and it was definitely an immersive experience. Deadspace is creepy rather than terrifying; I didn't have to stop playing because of nerves, mainly because I'm not a pussy (hah) and also because the third person perspective mitigates the tension somewhat, unlike, say Alien: Isolation, another game that I was frequently reminded of while blasting through Deadspace's fourteen hour runtime. Having never played the original, this was a new experience, and I enjoyed it immensely. Poor starship engineer Isaac discovers that the Ishimura is overrun with grotesquely mutated monsters wearing their insides on their outsides, and as his comrades are slowly picked off, he must scrounge together enough improvised weaponry and ammo to survive. The arsenal is limited to six weapons, but they are all memorable. The plasma cutter is a hard-hitting pistol you'll use to surgically remove the necromorph's limbs (necromorph=xenomorph from Aliens) which is the only way to put most enemies down permanently. My two favorites were the contact beam, a powerful laser cannon, and the ripper, an industrial saw that hovers a rotating blade in front of you, perfect for sawing up nasty beasties. This is a gory game, with blood and entrails scattered everywhere, and Isaac can recover more ammo or health drops by curb stomping the disfigured remains of his opponents, rendering their corpses into glistening giblets.
The story is serviceable, with Isaac's objectives frequently being changed as the shit hits the fan, and a memorable doublecross occurring during the last couple hours. There are audio and text logs to discover, but I've tired of that mechanic since System Shock 2, so I usually just skimmed through the latter. My only real complaint is that Deadspace stutters a lot. The game compiles shaders before launch, so I don't know why it stutters so much, but it happens frequently, usually whenever you're entering a new room. So despite the game running around 100 frames per second at 1440p on my rtx 3080 powered-computer, it never quite feels smooth. If you're intolerant of hitchy gameplay, then maybe stay away from this one, (or any new computer release). Seems like a lot of games are being released in shoddy condition lately on pc. Hopefully that changes.
Screens and a gameplay video below:
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