Swapping a derelict ship for a massive space station, Titan, that’s collapsing as you shut down a government-made clusterfuck paid off immediately players were no longer just roaming ruinous areas looking to tinker with systems and machinery while fighting off Necromorphs. Isaac is back in Dead Space 2, as his mind starts to fall apart. It mostly plays and feels like a more polished version of its predecessor, yet the pace and flow of both exploration and enemy encounters was shaped by the huge change of scenery and a more ambitious plot. The thing is that most of the changes and additions affected the narrative and setting first and foremost, which in turn brought new opportunities to the game’s overall design (and not the other way around). I also went back to interviews that seem to support the line of thought that Visceral always intended to expand the canvas and try new things with Dead Space 2. We know that EA has always liked to chase down trends and rework formulas to hopefully broaden its player bases, so it’s not a big leap to consider this Resi-flavoured gear change, especially when Dead Space 3 doubled down on that direction and ended up losing sight of what made the first two games work so well. Perhaps it was Visceral’s plan all along, but Resident Evil 5’s more action-heavy take on its material arrived shortly after the first Dead Space and got people talking, so maybe that was factored into the sequel’s development. Varied gameplay sections help the pacing of Dead Space 2 more than its predecessor. Will EA remake the second game in the series next? We sure hope so. If Dead Space, despite its bigger scale, could be compared structurally to Alien, then Dead Space 2 was clearly borrowing some notes from its explosive sequel, Aliens.

That second entry materialized a little over two years later in Dead Space 2, a more action-oriented take on space-based horror.

I vividly remember Dead Space being a huge sleeper hit in late 2008, automatically becoming one of the scariest games ever, and with such a big cliffhanger wrapping up the first chapter of Isaac Clarke’s story, talk of a sequel quickly heated up. Going back to it, ahead of this month’s shiny remake of the original, to confirm my suspicions, I can now proudly declare it’s the best installment of Visceral’s trilogy. Released 27 months after the original game – back when development cycles weren’t absurdly long – Dead Space 2 found success in early 2011, but history and online discussion haven’t elevated it to cult status like they did with the 2008 classic.

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