Recent reviews by ghostbones

I was excited to get this game as a lover of Sci-Fi horror, and the Dead Space series. After playing all the way through, I regret to confirm that this game is a massive disappointment. While early on it shows a great deal of promise it ultimately fails to deliver on almost every level possible. To highlight my biggest grievances:

1.) For a game aiming to make the melee more involved than Dead Space, the decision to make dodging just the matter of holding in a direction is baffling. If it was at least timed, or required some degree of input it would have gone a long way to feel more interactive. This totally breaks down when you're required to fight more than one enemy at a time as the automated dodging and lock-on system will ping pong you back and forth and result in a number of unnecessary deaths.

2.) Enemy variation suffers heavily. They boil down to: Jump Scare Slug, Zombie, Bigger Zombie, All-Fours Zombie, Zombie that spits goo, Blind Zombie, Bomb Zombie, and Two-Head Zombie mini-boss that kills you in one hit so make sure you hold the stick in the dodge position all of the time while you shoot them. This is also how you kill the only real boss, they just take more than one hit to kill you.

3.) A lack of meaningful set pieces or battles. Really any memorable moments at all. There is nothing in this game that comes close to the level of "those moments" in the Dead Space series.

4.) The weapons also show a lack of inspiration. They are Big Pistol, Smaller Pistol, Shotgun Pistol, Shotgun, Assault Rifle. None of them really do anything unique from each other unless you completely upgrade them, an investment competing with your (one and only) melee weapon and GRP (telekinesis) module, which are ultimately more versatile and important.

5.) The last point I want to hit is minor but another stunning oversight: Why can't you retrieve pick-ups, or enemy corpses/pieces with your GRP? Dead Space had that from the start, and removing this ability leads to you only being able to throwing living enemies at conveniently placed spike walls/fans, or out of the playable areas, which trivializes large sections of the game and kills whatever tension there might have been.

There are many, many more things to be disappointed about because the framework of something wonderful is there. The art design is excellent. The levels have a lot of potential. There's a lot that could be done but instead the whole thing reeks of cut corners and lack of a clear gameplay vision.

In summary: Just play Dead Space again. You'll have a better time.