The Dead Space games are some of my favourite horror games as well as being some of the best games that I've ever played. When I heard that there would be a spiritual successor to the series from the original co-creator as well as a handful of devs that worked on the original game I was beyond hyped. Needless to say, while this is a relatively decent game, it is beyond disappointing in comparison to the perfection of the Dead Space games :-(

When playing this game, while there were some cool ideas regarding the melee combat and nicely produced aspects such as the sound design, it felt like I was playing an inferior version of dead space through it. It took most of the things that made dead space unique, and rather than expanding on those parts it went in the opposite direction by making them worse. Uninteresting creature designs and enemy variety, shallow combat that quickly gets repetitive, bad story/lore, uninteresting aesthetics, jankiness that ruins the flow of the game, and many other issues. Also, while I never found the dead space games to be scary (tbf i don't find a lot of horror games scary as I'm hard to scare), they handled the horror very well by keeping the player tense with various combat scenarios that threw these mutated monstrosities at you. The horror in this game can be laughably bad at times, there are some really bad jumpscares in here.

While I appreciate the effort put into this game, and I found my playthrough to be relatively enjoyable this was a game that unfortunately failed to meet my expectations. New AAA horror IPs are rare, so seeing one like this fail sucks. Hopefully if the devs end up making a sequel to this game, they end up taking the various criticisms seriously as this game had lots of untapped potential.

6.5/10