There’s something about this era of game design that still shines through, and still hasn’t been lost in the update. Blowing off a necromorph’s claw, grabbing it with Kinesis and sending it flying back still feels great.

The Plasma Cutter rips through limbs, the Ripper slices through bodies, and the Force Gun lets out a deafening boom with each discharge. Isaac is an engineer, trying to survive on a mining ship, so his implements and arsenal are all improvised from tools not normally meant for such violence. Still, so much of what drew me to Dead Space is still here. It works really well, and builds up the big dramatic swings very well.

Isaac even speaks and removes the helmet a few times, with his Dead Space 2 and 3 voice actor Gunner Wright lending his voice. A few moments have some massive added drama and tension, characters from the original shine in new ways, and the remade versions of them look fantastic. When the narrative takes drastically different turns, though, it really works. Some are gated by security level too, something you might not realize until you get there and find out you can’t open the right door yet. While I enjoyed the drive and some of the content itself, actually back-tracking for these objectives felt a bit hollow, as it usually just meant walking back through old corridors, following my basketball-dribble waypoint line to its next target. Motive has introduced a few side quests that expand the narrative of the game, diving deeper into certain characters or different sides of the Ishimura crew. Something that I didn’t gel quite as well with were the side quests.

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