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It's an expanded echo of the original Dead Space – not just repeating the haunted ship routine, but bringing the quiet, tense and considered approach to a frozen flotilla of craft with Isaac shuttling between them.ĭusty airlocks and the grand, muffled spectacle of Isaac drifting through space are the foreground to the game's hard sci-fi style, and it fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity. The first major stop is a floating scrapheap, with Isaac exploring a series of derelicts looking for a way to reach the planet below. The segments feel episodic, as though they were built by different teams and bolted together to create a varied, lengthy whole. This is possible because it consists of big, distinct sections: a breathless high-stakes opener (in the James Bond tradition, appropriately enough), a claustrophobic few hours in a debris field of broken ships orbiting a planet, a lengthy action push on the planet's icy surface, and a climactic section in an ancient city. Should it be a cold, lean horror, or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both. The debate over Isaac-as-engineer versus Isaac-as-action-hero feeds into Dead Space's genre identity crisis. "Should it be a lean horror or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both." But at the same time, Isaac fights wave after wave of monsters while saying things like, “I turned my back on the world because I couldn't face what had to be done,” – and he's not talking about an oil change or repairing a carburettor.
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