

Sections with no atmosphere as a timer on your back slowly ticks down showing when you’ll run out of oxygen, and it’s all served by a minimalistic UI that has indicators for your health and stasis meters built into your engineering suit. There are zero gravity sections where you find yourself jumping from surface to surface like a missile. Finding power nodes and credits as you stomp on dead bodies or open crates allows you to add to your overall health pool, stasis abilities, and reserves, and buy new weapons and healing items. Much like the limited ammo system you have a very limited amount of this stasis power at the start. While aiming you can press X to initiate a time slowdown on enemies and the environment or B to move specific items and environmental objects. It is played in a rather close-up 3rd person perspective with an emphasis on shooting and telekinetic abilities. This wasn’t the biggest budget title, but you can see the skill, craftsmanship, and eh hem “dedication to working” that the creatives behind the series had. This is a survival horror game, so your inventory is limited, ammo can be sparse, and it is still absolutely terrifying the first playthrough.įor such an old game the writing holds up well, and in general, the voice acting is solid. The best way to stop them is with your trusty plasma cutter as you meticulously sever their arms, legs, mid sections, heads… pretty much everything. Lots of bad things have gone on and immediately you’re introduced to the necromorphs. You are an engineer sent to figure out why a ship has stopped responding. The story of these games and I loved all three in different ways, is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. Sadly, there are no FPS Boost or resolution enhancements, but despite its low resolution and blurry textures the game somehow still looks great. I hit a bug not long into the game where I couldn’t advance and so I swapped over to my Series X. Sadly it was released back in the era of real shoddy PC ports, and it requires a lot of manual fixes to get it working well.

Originally, I was going to try and play the game on my PC through the EA Play app. Don’t Play it on PC Unless You Are Willing to Tinker It’s available through EA Play if you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, so let’s get into why this one is worth checking out.

It is a terrifying, violent, and still brilliant title that holds up far better than I could have imagined while playing it on my Series X.

You are Isaac, an engineer tasked with finding out what happened to the Ishimura, a spaceship in orbit above the planet Aegis VII. There is a remake of the first title arriving in January of 2023, so I wanted to take a quick look back at why this 2008 release has become such a beloved classic. Dead Space is the start of one of my favorite trilogies in gaming.
