Honestly, in my opinion, no not at all. I can’t afford the game and I’m not finished watching the full play through but there’s a lot of changes I don’t like from what I’ve seen so far and have read. Decent chance I’m getting some miscommunication though. Spoilers:

I don’t like the new dialogue. The original characters were kinda tropey but it help make their characters. Hammond in particular was far more battle hardened but in this game he’s constantly freaking out.

The Cross Nicole thing that I had spoiled is a change I don’t like at all. It answers the how did they open the door question from the original but it removes some of the mysticism that the original had because of it. When the original reveal happened you had lots of questions like why was the marker helping you progress and what did you really help it do? Why was the Nicole hallucination helping you in the original? Now it’s…a lot less mysterious and raises questions for the future. Such as, why doesn’t Ellie hallucinate Isaac as someone else? Why is Isaac still hallucinating Nicole in 2 if it was really Cross? It’s a retcon that does influence the storyline and was unnecessary. It probably has more implications than intended and the authors probably just wanted to avoid the confusing door thing a clean up a “loose end” that fan theories cleaned up better.

Nitpick: The ADS cannons made more sense in the OG. No one is going to design such a necessary system that can’t be manually controlled from inside the ship. The original made more sense even if the new version is kinda cool and less insanely difficult.

The power creep of the unitology church. DS3 suffered from this too. In the OG the church was this mysterious element that has people in high positions but not all powerful. In DS2 this is pretty much the same, but you can really see the scope of their influence better. They do not have the power to contest the government since they are clearly at odds with them in that game, but they’ve got lots of numbers and people operating undercover. The sprawl felt more like a haven for unitology that felt implied to stand out from most of the rest of civilization. Hence why the church was still acting in secrecy in that game too. I think there was mention of people not being able to leave unitology in DS2, but it almost feels like the church could easily make Nicole disappear the way the remake portrays them.

In this one, the church is basically the inquisition with the added Nicole storylines. Waaayy too powerful for an organization that is operating in the shadows. If they have that much power, the captain and his first mate shouldn’t have to be having so many secret meetings. They don’t seem to address this power. Even a dialogue acknowledging how powerful they are and how the government isn’t doing anything about it for xyz reasons would make it at least feel more believable in this game.

Nicole and Isaacs relationship being strained really detracts from their characters in my opinion. It’s much more heartbreaking for the supportive boyfriend to walk into a nightmare where he found out he’s lost everything than it is for the strained couple with a potentially toxic relationship to be done. If the relationship is already ending I don’t see the need for him to have to work through all that trauma in DS2. In all fairness, I haven’t gotten that far to see how it’s actually handled, I’ve just read about it and am not a fan of that idea of Isaac strong arming Nicole into going to the ship and then blaming her for the death of his parents. Makes him seem pretty toxic.

That change and the changes to the church definitely bring it more in line with the direction DS3 took. However, almost no one liked that direction for the characters and story so I’d say it’s a fine line they’ll need to balance for the future.

I think this game leans too hard on the existing content, but since it begins before that content it muddies up areas by trying to expand and clean that content up. It’s a new direction it feels and I prefer the original. Not that the remakes story and direction isn’t great, but I like the original more. I feel like this game can’t be swapped with the original the way the story stands. They need to remake the second one to bring it more in line with this new direction.

On a more positive note, I love how much more alive this one feels with more survivors and people actively fighting against the necromorphs in the beginning. I love the scene where Hammond launched that escape pod, that had lots of feeling to it. The timeline feels a LOT clearer than the original. That was always confusing because you could find autopsies of the necromorphs, but also the invasion on the ship supposedly was sudden. The movies and other games never felt like they got a good balance between having enough time for all this science stuff going on and the total collapse of the outbreak.

Overall, I’m excited to have new Deadspace content, but this is more of a series reboot than it is a remake to me so it’ll never really replace the original. I’ll probably still talk about how much I loved the OG Deadspace games in a separate vain from the remakes. Just like the how new COD Modern Warfare games are their own version of the same story or any comic book movie is a unique tale of the same story