A phenomenal title, and anyone who knows me will know that whilst I prefer the second, this is still great. In fact, almost all of my issues with this game only exist as comparisons to the sequel.

Problems that don't come from the sequel are that the art design, whilst functional, is very colorless, this isn't neccessarily an issue, but when the enemies are so close in color to the only color that environments are made of for the whole game then some issues may occur, especially accessability issues. Moreover it just makes the stretches of nothing that happen a few times during this game feel even more bland, it really feels like some sections of the game only exist because they needed to be working on something whilst figuring out what the next 'real' part of the game was going to be.

Issues I have comparing this to the seuqel, first the art design, yes I know I just mentioned this but when you look at the incredible environment, enemy and general art design of Dead Space 2 it really puts in perspective how much they didn't do here. You get to see everything the game has to offer visually within the first 40 minutes and it never even tries to surprise you, which is a shame.
As well as this the combat, This game was made when EA asked for 'Resident Evil 4 in space', but it feels more like a more traditional Survival Horror game in the actual combat. It has a lot less of the difficulty in killing enemies than you see in both RE4 and DS2; in this game enemies fall apart like they're made of styrofoam. I understand they wanted to show off their fancy dismemberment (they remind you that's how to kill enemies enough times), but they sacrifice some of the challenge in the process. This as well as a lot worse button assignment compared to the sequel, worse movement (the zero-g sections in this game are so lame they even took Dead Space 2's zero-g for the remake) and weapons that feel a lot more alike than they do in the sequel, where each weapon has a lot of unique use cases, whereas here it's either a rifle or a line gun.

This game does have some better enemy placement than the seuqel, with enemies almost constantly being hidden around corners, helping with the atmosphere which is largely held back by the inferior art design and sound design, it really gains a lot from these easy scares that make sure you're always on edge.
Also, because it happens less often than the sequel, although there's less variety and less impressiveness to the setpieces here they feel more impactful on the character as they feel much more punctuative.

This is a great game, equal parts Resident Evil 4 and The Thing for PS2, and I cannot wait for a remake, especially as it's going to be changing a lot about the game from the looks of things, I'm very interested to see how that goes. This is a must play, and for sure the second best Dead Space game and one of the best survival horror games ever made.

Reviewed on Oct 11, 2022


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