moderatelycold
Wayyyyyy better than the original Separate Ways. A little bit concerned how close the series is going towards RE 6's Scooby Doo 2 Bio Monsters Unleashed and pretty linear but otherwise a blast.
this game's biggest flaw is that there's no sequel
2014
Big labor of love, a pretty good game and balanced well enough that it feels challenging, occasionally unfair but not in a way that deterred me.
2023
Uniformly excellent. I miss some of the charm/predictable comfort of the original but there's new things now that I can't believe were ever missing from this particular scenario.
2012
still incredible. trial and error never felt so dangerous
2023
this is such a dead on tweaking of the original that it makes that original game worse in retrospect. Dead Space 2023 fills in every possible gap, playing with your expectations and adding in many more easter eggs for fans of the series. It's like a cross between ideas in REmake and RE2 remake: a little bit of gameplay tweaks here and there, a few more things brought into better focus, some tedious parts done away with, and bringing the story a lot more in line with Dead Space 2. Speaking of, I really really hope this team gets to work on DS2 next because they'll probably knock it out of the park like they did with 1, and it's my preferred game in any case. Great stuff!
2018
It's short, but all of it is incredibly entertaining. Twee and silly but has a knowing wink about it, kind of an Adventure Time thing. Smiled the whole way through.
Way too little, way too late!
2022
While reaching the end of this was very depressing, it's undeniably an achievement. A bit of weird fiction and a lot of Silent Hill makes it work. I don't see myself picking it up again but I'd recommend to anyone who's a fan of anything they threw in this gumbo pot. It's incredible aside from a few gameplay foibles and my own very specific hangup about the plot, which hits on a lot of low hanging fruit of horror. I don't know! It's great but I kind of hate some parts intensely. I would play whatever the developers made next.
2014
When I played this for the first time, I thought it was simultaneously half-baked and overstuffed with ideas, janky but weirdly purposeful. Still think that on playthrough number 2 but also it kind of rules. Nonstop infinite nightmare through the mind melt of a ton of people, most prominently, a serial killer trying to kill you in very (cheap) ways, story is completely vague without DLC (which should have been interlude chapters and would've broken up the monotony!) but it's a fun idea to just drop the player out of the frying pan and into the fire with zero context. Aiming is still... bizarre, but i get it - enemies aren't meant to get close enough that you miss. This game rewards patient, careful play above anything, turning the survival horror experience into a bunch of mini encounters. It does come off like RE4 if it was just Mikami and not Kamiya, making you skulk around for scraps to survive just past another encounter instead of letting you be the action star. This game's worst parts coincidentally are when you fight a ton of guys instead of dropping you into these levels - Chapter 6's beginning especially. That said, it's incredibly rewarding when you scrape by another situation just by the skin of your teeth, but it frequently feels like there's no time to adapt to a changing situation. Which adds to the cruel and unfair vibe - a terrific choice that in actuality feels like pulling nails to play. If this kept the harshness but made it easier to control, added in the stealth enhancements of the DLC, and made it more technically stable, it would be an all timer. Unironically could use a remake more than Last of Us or Resident Evil 4. PS: Psychobreak is the cooler name.
2022
Completely admirably nails its core gameplay conceit. At a point breaking the levels is like an incredibly precise puzzle game. Also nails the anime cringe aesthetic, so if that hits close to home, don't put on voice acting.
2013
It's cool how big money men ruin something that could be good and then point to it like "see this thing sucks due to the changes we advised. kill the series." anyways, bad game with a better game that peeks out of it every so often
I couldn't get into the gameplay as much because I always felt a flow state was just beyond my ability, which is almost certainly -skill issue- so I won't dock for that, but honestly a good metal gear game with all the metal gear-isms and like, one of the most insane final hours especially for internet addled politics nerds. Of course it became a meme classic.
2011
in every way an improvement but instead of a slow metroid/re4 trawl through a haunted house ship of terrors dead space 2 opts for catapulting you through a series of literally facemelting science fiction space physics setpieces that feel much more at home with resident evil 6 or uncharted 2. yet here every single gameplay evolution is perfectly calibrated to ds2's blink and youre dead tone, a fast paced survival horror gameplay where you have to think on your feet to dodge horrible space industrial accidents and dismember the most amount of limbs in the shortest time possible. the leads have pretty tight chemistry for a videogame and isaac clarke's mentally fragile man on a mission makes his struggle compelling and believable, a homerun evolution from his initial silent characterization, making for a somewhat standard but (sneakily!) a genuinely affecting resolution. one of my favorite horror games
2008
still awesome. could use a little more environment variety and drags a bit at the end, two problems dead space 2 fixes handily.