What constitutes a remake or a remaster or even a reboot? Regardless of what you call it, today we’re looking at Dead Space, the new recreation of the classic survival horror game. The original is beloved by many – will history repeat itself here?
What’s on the menu?
Motive studios have some space experience, but this war is of a much bloodier kind, and remaking such a cherished sci-fi tale is surely a daunting task. The weapon of choice is DICE’s long serving Frostbite engine which has been used for everything from Battlefield to FIFA. Here they have to turn down the lights for a gory, tension-soaked rebirth of Isaac aboard the doomed Ishimura. The upgrades and rebuilt assets and models transform the entire game, and Isaac himself is now front and center with many of Dead Space 2’s improvements merged into the first game.
Let’s start with the changes from the 2008 original, which was an impressive game for the time and still holds up well due to its focused technology and strong art direction. As dark and grimy as the original was, the new game manages to make the original look bright in comparison. Far more light sources emphasize the dark and highlight focal points, which is used to build tension in the new game. Improved occlusion comes from screen space ambient occlusion and even ray traced ambient occlusion on PC, PS5, and Series X. Shadows are not only far more abundant, mixing shadow maps with screen spaced shadows, but also more accurate from multiple torches and electric strips. Although the original was very forward-looking with its reliance on light and shadows, the team ensured that flickering lights cause dancing shadows and looming shapes in many old and new areas.
These updates and changes are often subtle, diverting your expectations even for long time fans. Significantly improved models, facial animation, eye movement and materials all leap out over the original’s flat, single-shaded surfaces. Gore is a core pillar of the game, and improved dismemberment allows for skin to be chopped away revealing bone and sinew before the limb is finally cleaved off. The visual upgrades continue with screen space reflections, significantly increased geometry and detail, and improved and fully re-made textures with impressive physically-based materials. It is safe to say the results on a technical and artistic front are a rousing success and, dare I say it, even improve in some areas over the original. This is a tall order in anyone’s book, but when the source material is this strong the expectations are equally high.
The use of Frostbite means that 60fps, or even greater on PC, is an upgrade from the old 30fps of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. The visual fidelity mode (which I will call the Ray Tracing mode for ease in this review) and Performance mode on Series X and PS5 rely on DRS and FSR2 for their intended outputs. However, both target 60fps.
The Performance mode runs the lowest resolution level, 2560x1440, to maintain 60fps, along with lower effects, no ray tracing, and reduced fog volumes, screen space reflection (SSR) quality, and even texture detail. Some of this though is that the FSR2 implementation does not appear to be well implemented. A combination of mip-map bias, variable rate shading (VRS), as well as the sharpening pass in Performance mode not being updated to compensate for the lower resolution. The PC can also utilise both FSR2 or DLSS2 (Nvidia RTX only) to reduce the cuts in that pixel-to-performance recipe, but again there’s no option in the menu to adjust sharpening, which may be a nice addition from the team later.
Image Quality
The game is often dark enough that the resolution gap is quite small when comparing between Performance and Ray Tracing modes. Aiding performance further appears to be a VRS implementation, which can be noticed on all three consoles and PC. The solution is often ok to middling, and can improve performance at texture and pixel-shading precision. But pixel blocking can be visible in close-view surfaces, such as Isaac himself in lifts, causing almost a macro-blocking look. These appear worse on PC than consoles and can be more pronounced with motion vectors in FSR and DLSS on PC. The Xbox Series S is affected the most due to its very low texture filtering, causing floors and surfaces to fade into a muddy soup at times at close range, alongside some blocky textures – which again may be related to the FSR2/DLSS2 engine implementation pipeline alongside VRS. In addition, the resolution levels here are very low, which leads to a noisy and soft image at times, effectively VRS works best with higher resolutions.
The Series S only has one mode, which sits between the Ray Tracing and Performance mode on Series X and PS5, but does not appear to run the ray traced AO setting and instead uses the screen space solution that the Performance mode runs, albeit slightly reduced compared to the Series X, PS5 and PC settings, though this may be resolution related. The cost is relatively low though, with approximately 5-10% impact dependant on scene, using my RX 6800 at 4K TAA going from SSAO to RTAO, which is one of the cheaper effects in the game. A ceiling of 1920x1080 is hit but is often around or at 1280x720 with FSR2 helping as best it can. The main issue is at these low resolutions the reconstruction has less data to work with, so it affects the image quality versus the other consoles.
Platform comparisons
The comparison to PS5 and Series X is unsurprisingly short: for all intents and purposes they are identical in both modes, with DRS and fps being the only potential difference. There are some subtle changes in lighting and gamma, but both look to match each other in the Performance and Ray Tracing mode. From multiple counts the Ray Tracing mode can hit a full 3840x2160, but the FSR2 pass is always reconstructing this, so that may not always be a native range. In quieter sections it is certainly at that level on both, but in action it can drop to an approximate low of 2240x1260, though this can and will change depending on the on-screen action. The range appears to be between Quality and Balanced within the FSR2 settings. Again the target is 60fps, but is most of the time below that on both.
Performance mode drops this to a 1440p high and an approximate 1536x864 low, and again in heavy action it can shift between Quality and Balanced to that 1440p high. This leaves a softer image than the other mode but I would say that even in side-by-side this does not really stand out, other than the texture clarity and filtering I mentioned. In addition, this mode turns off RTAO and enables the game’s SSAO. Screen Space Reflections are reduced as are the fog volumes and even lighting in the game, but some of these are tied to resolution so that may be the reason. Matching to PC settings is not fully possible, as even across a selection of tests the RTAO and lighting on PC does not exactly match the consoles. As a rough guide, the consoles appear to be between Medium and High on some settings. Certainly shadow maps appear to be closest to medium with most others being High and maybe Ultra on SSR. In Performance mode they appear to drift closer to medium, and using the PC as a rough proxy, going from Ultra to High nets you approximately 21% improvement, and from High to Medium provides a further 35% gain. This is likely what the Series S is running at with lights possibly even being closer to Low.
Console Performance
The Xbox Series S is often below 60fps in heavy combat and real-time cinematics – the opening one being the most stressful section I found across all platforms. Here we can get down to 30fps. Some of these are simply context, memory stutters, and general code issues that can cause some minor 60-80 ms stutters. Aside from this all other dips stay within 16 and 33ms frame-times. The net result is that in this section we are often around and even below the VRR range to solve the issues on all formats. That said, in many of the corridor sections, which the game is largely comprised of, it can be a steady 60fps, with only single dips being almost invisible.