The Dead Space Remake looks fantastic. Despite every cynical, hesitant bone in my body bracing for something to go horribly wrong, it really does look like EA Motive have a fair chance at sticking the landing. Except for one lurking, lingering question hiding in the dark – a notorious, mischievous moment in gaming history that was the bugbear of many a player in Dead Space. It was so awful, in fact, that in some cases it stopped entire playthroughs dead in their tracks. It nearly even halted my own journey into what would become my favorite series.
I am, of course, referring to the turret sections of Dead Space, where you inexplicably shoot at space rocks in the world’s worst version of Asteroids.
According to developers at the time, these strange segments were meant to be pace-breaking shake-ups. You know, nice, cathartic shooting galleries to shift the experience from lurking survival horror to infinite ammo-blasting fun. Now I want to be clear that I’m actually a fan of a good turret sequence, but this isn’t that. The gameplay I’ve linked to below is of a player who’s experienced with the ADS – you can tell because their hull integrity is at 83% by the end. For most players, achieving that higher a number can sometimes take over an hour of trial and error. It’s no exaggeration to say that this section stopped some people in their tracks, begging for an option to skip it. Your difficulty setting also has no bearing on it, so even those on Easy are left scrambling as much as someone on Impossible difficulty.
The aim sensitivity is completely different for the turret than anywhere else in the game, your targets only spawn within a range that gives you mere seconds to respond, and sometimes your shot just turns them into multiple smaller chunks of asteroid that do more damage. Plus, if by chance you play on PC like I did back in the day, then this gets even worse because of the mouse sensitivity issues of the PC port that are bad enough it necessitated a fan patch. Suffice to say, I didn’t know there was a fan patch, and I’m still not sure how I developed the muscle reflexes, but I eventually soldiered through, thinking that surely they wouldn’t bring back the dreaded ADS cannon later in the game. Right? Right?
Nope. As if you hadn’t suffered enough the first time, the second sequence that warrants strapping into an ADS cannon is a boss fight to boot, with a giant tentacled slug-crab-spider hybrid throwing all manner of explosives at you while you try to nail a shot on its flailing arms. Spray-and-pray works a bit better in this particular instance, so it’s ironically easier than the asteroids, but still an absolute headache to deal with that’s nowhere near the ‘refreshing change of pace’ the devs justified it as.
So the question is – will these return in the Dead Space Remake? We don’t actually know, but my word, if EA Motive have any good sense of mind, I sincerely hope they don’t. Neither adds anything to Dead Space that a proper Zero-G section couldn’t replace. It’s not a coincidence that the mainline Dead Space games wouldn’t feature another dedicated turret set-piece until Dead Space 3, which was much better designed and over in under thirty seconds.
With all the other fine-tuning they’ve been doing, hopefully the game’s biggest blemish will finally be a thing of the past. I guess we’ll all know soon when Dead Space launches for Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 5, and PC on the 27th.
