‘Dead Space’ hands-on: Gruesome sci-fi horror has by no means felt so comforting | Engadget

The Dead Space remake needs to be higher than Dead Space. The unique got here out 14 years in the past and imploded frequent concepts of what a horror recreation must be: It decreased the facility of the headshot and stripped away all on-screen icons to immerse us within the ravaged corridors of the Ishimura, the place we had been stalked by half-human monsters with freakishly elongated limbs. Dead Space was terrifying and thrilling and shocking, and these feelings have solely made the sport shine brighter in our reminiscences. This is the model of Dead Space that the remake has to compete with — the one which lives solely in our heads, filtered by nostalgia. It looks like an unattainable commonplace to achieve. But I believe the Dead Space remake nails it — largely.

Motive Studio and EA held a demo occasion for Dead Space final month, and I acquired to play the primary three chapters of the remake, stopping simply after Isaac restarted the centrifuge. This was the total recreation in pre-beta type and I performed on PC with an Xbox controller. It was instantly spectacular by fashionable requirements: The metallic rooms of the Ishimura had been stuffed with crisp, horrific particulars, and the well being indicator working up Isaac’s backbone was clearer than ever. Tense instrumentals and mechanical buzzing noises rose and fell as he explored the ship, and sharp audio cues saved the sense of impending doom alive. Some of the sounds tapped immediately into my nostalgia neurons, significantly on the save stations and whereas choosing up objects.

The Dead Space remake has contemporary voice performing, puzzles, storylines and mechanics, and an AI-driven director that maximizes the horror of every scene. This system doesn’t randomize the habits of enemies, however it units off environmental options like steaming pipes, harsh whispers and flickering lights. Whatever the horror director was doing throughout my playthrough, it labored — I used to be suitably scared in each setting.

In the demo, Dead Space adopted a well-recognized cadence of darkish hallways and towering necromorphs, however it additionally provided a handful of surprises. For one, the heart beat rifle had a brand new various hearth that threw out a small proximity mine, relatively than a 360-degree spray. (Nothing concerning the plasma cutter was modified as a result of the plasma cutter is and all the time has been good.) And then there was the revamped zero-gravity mechanic — as a substitute of clinging to surfaces and leaping off of them in an prolonged soar, the Dead Space remake let me swim by way of the air, opening up new puzzle and exploration alternatives, particularly along with the stasis and kinesis talents. It all felt fully pure, as if this was what builders wished to do with Dead Space the primary time round, however our 2008 {hardware} simply couldn’t deal with it.

Honestly although, at this time’s {hardware} can’t deal with this model of Dead Space, at the very least not in its present preview type. There are not any loading screens within the remake and this function brought on crucial issues throughout my playthrough. I encountered important and protracted framerate points all through the demo, significantly after strolling by way of doorways, as background loading kicked in. My recreation crashed as soon as and I voluntarily restarted it one other time, after slogging by way of a number of scenes of stuttering animations. The framerate points had been extraordinarily irritating. Isaac additionally felt sluggish at sure factors, inflicting me to misfire my weapons or waste time stomping on already-dead enemies. I wasn’t the one participant within the room to expertise these issues, although some demos appeared to run simply tremendous from begin to end. Developers at Motive made it clear they had been conscious of those points and promised they’d be resolved earlier than launch day, however my preview expertise was lower than seamless.