Dead Space 

2008 that is when the original Dead Space launched on PC and consoles alike, fast forward 15 years
and the classic game has received a wonderful remake that is most true to the original with some
tweaks overall, not only counting Graphical and Sound, Light overhaul but also some added dialogue
that fills in more on the story for those who remember it and were perhaps left with some questions.

I have to confess I played Dead Space around the time it launched, but I could not remember the whole story,
so this was a delight for me to revisit and behold; the new beautiful graphics and sounds
in a environment that is guaranteed to keep you glued to the chair whilst playing, and perhaps make you
a bit twitchy every time you hear some strange sounds.

For those who might not be familiar with the story of Dead Space, a quick summary of what has happened.
You are Isaac Clarke an Engineer onboard USG Kellion with your fellow crew mates responding to an
emergency help request by the giant Planet harvesting/mining ship USG Ishimura, and as you guessed
things go wrong straight away, your ship crashes onto the Ishimura, your crew mates are scattered
around the ship, and you have a bad feeling about the situation, and this is where the game begins.

Trying to find out what has happened on the Ishimura, becomes very clear quickly in the game, systems
malfunctioning everywhere, blood everywhere, and you stumble upon the first bodies and text written
in blood on the walls, the game already nailed the atmosphere back in 2008, but with todays technology
it is amazing to see the difference or should I say how far we have advanced within computer games,
the added light effects, raytracing and even in the sound department.. takes this classic up to
a whole new level of creepy and fun. I have added below a few pictures from the EA Website to show
the graphics back in 2008, and the slider on top of course features snapshots I took whilst playing
the game on Steam for your comparison: to have a better sense of how much work or rather love has
been put in.

As you notice from the tone of my writing so far, I am full of praise for this remake and rightfully
so, this is out there with remakes such as Resident Evil 2 and 3, well executed for old players
and new alike.

Dead Space depending on the difficulty choice you make, in it’s 12 chapters and side missions
to play from beginning to end takes around 8.5 hours minimum if you remember to use those save
spots frequently, and manage not to get yourself killed in some gruesome way. The game caters to all
levels of players, beginners and hardcore with the choices from Story Mode, easy, medium, hard and
later on a New Game+

The controls of the game felt solid the whole way, easy to wrap your head around but you also have
customization options if you feel the need to change the layouts.

For those who might be wondering about collectibles and different weapons, suits etc. The answer is
Yes; The Deluxe edition of the game also comes with a variety of different suits for Isaac, and you’ll
have a grand time during your playthrough to find power nodes for you to upgrade the weapons which are
plentiful or the suit mechanics, investing in upgrading at least one of the weapons fully and aiming
for a full suit upgrade makes the game a bit easier to handle in your playthrough as logically you
are more powerful, but it also gives you a bit more time on certain missions to scurry around and
find hidden items, log entries, or even more power nodes etc. Steam has a total 47 achievements
to unlock and includes such things as collecting all the logs, schematics, and something for those
with patience and skill, not afraid to tackle the Impossible difficulty level.

As time passes in PC Gaming we’ve been pretty fortunate that most games in the past years have not
required the most modern and powerful CPU:s and GPU:s for us to enjoy the adventures laid on us,
I am starting to see a trend where after so many years the minimum has been a 2-4 GB GPU card, and
a 5-6th gen Intel CPU to accompany is not enough anymore, new games are starting to raise the bar,
and it’s understandable when tech moves forward, and games become more complex and beautiful.

This is the time where we are going to need perhaps some upgrades made to our rigs to be so called future proof.
Dead Space is no exception to this, raising the bar quite substantially with it’s minimum requirements
being a Ryzen 5 2600x or a Intel Core i5 8600 with 16GB of Ram, AMD RX 5700 or a Nvidia GTX 1070.
As you can see from the below image.

I played the game on my main rig, i5-9600k, 16GB of ram and a 8GB 3070 Nvidia GPU, paired with a 3440×1440
Monitor, whilst using DLSS on auto and occasionally trying out the other options such as balanced and
performance this netted me through my whole playthrough around 70-90 FPS, with one substantial dip to
the low 10’s on the End Game boss, changing my settings during that boss fight, got me back up to 40fps
so it was playable again, I’m not sure if this was a bug or what crapped out the frame rate here, but
overall on my playthrough the game was more than enjoyable, this also based on that I have the game
installed on a SSD, which ensured super fast loading times, starting the game or accidentally killing yourself.

Also worth mentioning, that I had 0 game-crashes during the playthrough, and the only odd “negative” thing
was that frame dip in the end game, but I am sure it will be mangled out in any updates if it is a bug.

I think I’ve covered what I wanted on Dead Space with this review, so I’ll move onto my final words.

Whether you played the game in 2008, or not played it yet, if you want to experience a good story,
some gory action, a game that actually will have you jump a few times because you got spooked..
Dead Space is the game for you, it’s worth a revisit, a first visit, and even a second visit
with new Game+

Judgement & Lost Judgement

One of my all time favorite series Yakuza had it’s spinoff with Judgement back in 2018
and Lost Judgement in 2021, both games received a remaster earlier this year for consoles
and I was in awe that it most likely will not see the daylight on PC; reminiscing earlier
statements that it might not happen, it was quite a delight to see that the games got an
surprise Steam release on the 14th of September just a bit over a week ago, so I had to jump
on the opportunity to dive into them and write a little bit about it for you. Normally
I would cover games one by one, but today as the games tie into each other so to speak:
And it came in a bundle pack, I think it kind of fits to give an overall score for both,
and as usual I will not spoil the story for you, but give you the background information
only, and how it plays.. so you can decide for yourself if it is something you would
like to give a spin.

What kind of a game is Judgement & Lost Judgement you might ask? after seeing the screenshots
posted above. Judgement is a third person action-adventure detective game that sets itself
apart from the Yakuza series, with deeper gameplay mechanics and a darker story.

Judgement’s backstory starts off with digging into your own past how you became a detective,
from managing to acquit Shinpei Okubo on a murder, only to see him arrested again shortly after
for the murder on his girlfriend, this drove you over the edge.. guilt ridden and you quit
your law career, fast forward a bit after some well made cut-scenes explaining it all and
we are in the present day, investigating a possible serial killer that has murdered 4
Yakuzas (Mafia) in the most gruesome way, gouging out their eye’s after he has killed them.

The Police quickly arrest a known Yakuza Captain that you run into earlier in the day pretty
much start of the game, the Yakuza family has requested the law firm where you worked to
investigate the matter, as they are old friends with the firms owner, here’s where you come in.
Your ex partner at the law firm is running the investigation and defending the Yakuza Captain
but you have more experience with the Yakuzas, and they want you as a private detective to find
out any possible evidence; now the game really starts to take shape as you venture around the
kamurocho district in Tokyo (you might recognize this from the Yakuza Games),
finding evidence, talking to people, and figuring out what really happened..

Is the Yakuza Captain Guilty or not? This is also the part where the game takes
distance from the Yakuza series previously, Yakuza is more of the over-the-top action than
anything, straight forward linear in a sense (though that also is in a semi open-world) setting.

Judgement introduces mechanics such as drones so you can sneak in undetected and find people,
tailing suspects, lock picking, an extremely annoying door knob “hacking” thing, and puzzling
together the evidence that you have picked up, analyzing pictures and so forth..

It brings depth into the game play, and let’s you get immersed into the story on a different
level, I particularly liked when you talk to witnesses or potential alibis that you have to
ask questions in a right order to get full points out of it, so it pays off to pay attention here.

For the story of Lost Judgement, you and your ex. Yakuza partner Kaito investigate a rather
strange case of how could a person do crimes in two places at the same time, a bystander on a crowded
train captures video of the accused groping a woman on a train in Tokyo whilst a murder happened
in Yokohama, Defense lawyer Shirosaki, has no doubt that crucial details of the situation
have been overlooked, as Ehara was not even tried for the murder. This is where you and Kaito
come into the picture, helping out some fellow friends and their Detective agency.

The question is though; How could Ehara have committed two crimes at once?
Was the sexual battery just a cover up? Has Ehara gamed the entire justice system?
As victims surface and Yagami digs farther into the truth, he is faced with a question:
Defend the law, or enact justice?

Also in Lost Judgement as Judgement there are some new mechanics that further set the series
apart from Yakuza, Parkour, Chasing (also in Judgement), Tailing, Infiltrate and Search..
with a ton of new gadgets and even a super good detective boi doggo.

Both the stories are long, and interesting, and do keep you on your toes as you immerse yourself.
Judgements story is around the 25-30 hour mark for the story itself and if you really love doing
everything that is possible to do in the game, it’s around a 100 hours easily. For Lost Judgement
you are looking at 23-24 hours for the main story and once more around a 100 hours to complete
everything possible.

So with this bundle you are looking at around 200+ hours of enjoyment, Lost Judgement also
comes with a DLC called The Kaito files that add a few more hours on top of everything.

What both games also feature besides all serious detective work is the wackiness that we found
already in the Yakuza games, with mini games and dating / meeting friends all over town.
There is a staggering amount of things you can play and challenge yourself with here,
To name a few; Drone Racing, Pinball, Mahjong, Batting center (Baseball), Darts..
And not only limited to that; there are some Arcade games you can play too Virtua Fighter 5 etc.
In Lost Judgement there are some old Sega 8-bit games etc.

So as you see it’s not just all serious business, dating, dancing.. eating, smoking, drinking..
To me that sounds like a good way to spend a weekend or many weekends playing both Games.

So that’s about the games story and side things you can do.

But how does it run?

Both Judgement and Lost Judgement, are super nice looking games with detail levels that surprised
me when you crank up the graphical levels, the game does require quite a lot of horsepower from
your system though, and to be honest with my i5-9600k 16gb of ram and a 8gb 3070 GPU I was
averaging around 70-90fps at medium detail, and this with FSR 2.0 in use (performance mode)
There is currently no DLSS option available, could be that will implemented later on? but for
now there is FSR 1.0 and 2.0 to choose from to accelerate things a bit. I’m not entirely sure
what happened during my playtime, but I had on several occasions some stuttering during gameplay
even in places that weren’t too crowded graphically and only lasted a short amount of time, I
guess this could be down to either not perfectly optimized, or I missed some settings?

But overall, when you set the frame rate to locked 60fps (options are there 60-120-Unlimited)
to pick from, you will have a nice time playing the game, if your system specifications are
around mine.

For both games, the Dubbing is fantastic in my ears, very talented folks doing the roles,
so nothing to complain about there.. and overall the world feels alive from a sound perspective.

Below I have posted the minimum and recommended system specs for both games.
Note, this is quite a large download when you install both.

Thanks for taking the time to read my review on Judgement and Lost Judgement of what to expect.

Judgement PC Requirements

Lost Judgement PC Requirements