The new dialogue is cringe as fuck and the voice acting is amateurish and risible. Talk about reading a fucking script. The altered plot delivery and script direction is fucking retarded and assumes you are also a retarded fucking niggerfaggot, immediately going out of its way to finger unitology as 'religion bad' and doctor mercer as a supervillain because you wouldn't want to be distracted with a slow burn plot delivery, oh no! Kyne is turned into a babbling retard for what little appearance he makes. Random shoehorned "omg necromorph chen has followed us the entire game lmao" narrative is stupid and tries way too hard to put a face onto the enemies, which I can only assume is because they want you to see how heckin' inclusive their diverse necromorph crew is. Thankfully the nigger pilot of the kellion dies early though you are forced into diversity hire elizabeth cross and her heckin' valid bisexual faggot boyfriend arc. (not a joke)
The new script is incapable of nuance. For example, hydroponics centers around two major threats: the toxin-spewing wheezers and the leviathan. Because the new script assumes you are a stupid ooking monkey and incapable of understanding two things independently it feels the need to merge these two things. Instead of "kill the wheezers, oh also make a poison to weaken then kill the leviathan" you get "the wheezers are outputs for the leviathan so make a poison, give it to the wheezers, this will weaken the leviathan so you can kill it, oh also here's a cringe as fuck Psalm 74:14 bible quote at you so your eyes can roll out of their sockets." Maybe it seems like a random nitpick but it represents the writer's inability to not centralize everything onto a common thread. To let multiple things be happening at once, unrelated to one another.
Isaac has voice lines and these are generally the least offensive as obviously the most fitting voice actor/character pairing, but even he is held back by shitty writing.
Sound effects are overprocessed and lack all subtlety - for example "oo spooky the zero-g jets sound like a spooky monster!" - no, shut up, that's retarded, why did you do this. Necromorph sound design was changed, not for the better, with more humanized screams and are now universally less identifiable and alert far less in combat situations, such as the burst-sac suicide enemies who would be unmissable on account of their unique MYAAAAGHHH screech. This screech, broadcast loudly and unmistakably across the entire combat arena would balance out their high lethality by preparing you for their approach. In the remake, they often will not alert at all on approach, but 'thankfully' their damage was reduced to be laughably low. What's the fucking point?
In a repeated trend the remake team completely missed the point on sound design in many significant locations: when proceeding through engineering there is a certain room which assaults you with galleries of piston-firing machines which are all extremely loud, which is intentionally placed just beyond an airlock to a vacuum area, where the audio is deadened. The original intent is to assault you with the noise as you exit the quiet zone. So of course the remake removes the vacuum. And the piston-firing machines. The room just "makes noise" now. No machines throwing wild shadows, no smoke to go along with the sudden sensory assault.
For what little I listened to the music (playing with music off is the superior way to go), it also tried too fucking hard, and what used to be a really well executed ambient soundscape where one could hear the entire ship creak and clang now again lacks subtlety. I hope you like the sound of BADUMP your own BADUMP heartbeat BADUMP though because that's all I can fucking hear and I had to stop playing with headphones.
I tried saving myself from the shitty dialogue too by setting dialogue volume to zero but wouldn't you know necromorph alerts are considered dialogue, for fuck's sake.
Speaking of removals, backporting free-float zero-g was a destructive change that adds nothing back. The player's first introduction to zero-g in the medical wing is supposed to throw you off as you have to dive to the surrounding surfaces, which flips your orientation and starts an ambush as you recenter yourself. With free-float zero-g? lmao just lift off, fly straight, and land. It's like being presented with a maze and you just climb up the wall and walk across it in a straight line. Many other zero-g segments that were host to intentional ambushes as you would dive into the unknown are now unmemorable, unchallenging transversal sections.
Semi-random unlocks via schematics were removed - weapons are now obtained in a fixed order through story progression, and upgrade potential gated through similarly progress-locked components. No longer can you min-max your expenses to max out a given weapon early.... which leads me to the node upgrades minigame. What minigame? They removed it. The system used to have dead nodes and you had a small bit of decision making to do on how to optimize your upgrade path. "Big deal, whatever", sure, but it was one of many minigames that helped give the game character and diversify its gameplay away from pure shooty-gun action. ADS cannon minigame - gone. Trench run to the ADS cannon - gone. Shooting gallery - gone.
But it's not like the additions were any better: the original had tightly controlled progression with no backtracking. The economy could not be cheesed, you could only do better in order to turn more of your resources into credits, to buy more nodes early. Remake adds full ship access and a set of unnecessary sidequests which will have you traverse old areas subject to random (and poorly executed) modifiers such as "all the lights are out but it looks weird because we didn't really do it well" and "now there's fog don't you like how we are using volumetric fog, what a great tech demo" or "wow look this vent is doing the grinding noise thing again! like when we did it two rooms ago!", but most importantly will throw spawns at you randomly which introduces two major problems, and one minor. One, you can now farm credits with efficient killing of the random encounters, two, holy shit I hate all this fucking backtracking, the original had tight progression through its levels and well planned enemy ambushes, which while often predictable also kept things fresh since they knew where you would be, which direction you'd be coming from, your relative power level, and how to shake things up a bit, leading to the minor third point - the random encounters are often laughably off target such as deploying in a room you are already exiting, letting you just fucking leave.
Speaking of efficient killing, the javelin mechanics are thoroughly fucked (though I will revisit the original to make sure this wasn't the case there). Not only does telekinesis fail to properly prioritize pickups and javelins, and frequently fails to tear them from corpses, but the targeting itself is subject to a severe autoaim. The javelins now no longer penetrate the target, they really only 'do damage' as they mystically pass through the enemy according to the forced targeting. In the late game, when dealing with partially armored necromorphs, javelins cannot be used as one cannot manually aim for exposed limbs - the javelin will only target the torso, and bounce off. You cannot change this.
All throughout the game you will notice poorly thought out animations and objects clipping in high visibility areas (tram deck opening through the tram car, comms antenna clipping through the floor, etc). Various situations were clearly coded like shit and not validated: You are given early access to the hangar bay, and the loading rail controls. Aligning the rails early prior to later loading the marker in the shuttle will cause them to desync, needing to be toggled and showing an obvious animation reset. Many hitboxes, often railings, are iffy and block shots they really shouldn't. Many, many textures are misaligned, many subtle but plenty visible sections will fail to render correctly, the object LoD is laughably short as you can see objects popping into existence from 30 feet away.
The game as a whole lacks artistic vision and genuinely looks worse than the original because all it has to stand on is current-gen smear-tech shit. AI frames, weird shifting dithering shadows and reflections, awful volumetric fog, none of which runs well and looks fucking terrible if you have the good taste not to subject yourself to the mother of all smear-techs, TAA antialiasing. Animations as a whole are not good and subjectively try way too fucking hard, everything is over-animated, from the simple act of lifting off into zero-g to isaac flipping the clasps on the back of the captain's rig in the morgue. There is a visible lack of attention to detail in all things.
So does the game do anything better?
Well there's no weird mouse acceleration but that hardly matters because the entire control scheme feels weird and unresponsive, and the keybinds constantly fight each other. Just run a fucking mod on the original and call it a day.
The remake is fucking awful and you should not play it.
Garbage DEI slop.
