You’re minding your own business, and you’ve just had a nice conversation with one of the only normal people left on the USG Ishimura in the Dead Space Remake. Next thing you know, a biological murder-tank busts through a door to cancel your party. Here’s how to defeat the Brute boss and get the Brute Force trophy and achievement.
Giving the Brute the Boot: How to Beat Brutes in Dead Space
Screenshot by GameSkinny
The good news is that Brute bosses are actually a little easier to beat than they were in the original Dead Space. There, the graphics were just murky enough that you didn’t get a lot of feedback when you shot it, so you were never entirely sure how well you were doing until either it died or you did.
In the remake, the Brute has acquired pulsating sacs on the unarmored parts of its body, similar to the nodules that you’ve had to target before now in order to clear away Corruption. Those sacs are the Brute’s weak points, and damage delivered there will take it down in surprisingly short order.
Screenshot by GameSkinny
The Brute’s faster than it looks and hits like a freight train, however, so it’s not quite as easy as that. This is especially true in your first confrontation with a Brute on the Bridge, when you probably haven’t seen a stasis recharge unit for a while unless you’ve done some backtracking.
The short version is that you should hit the Brute with your stasis unit, then circle around behind it and target its sacs with weapons fire. You’ll know that you’ve scored a hit to the proper area when blood/ichor flies out. After surprisingly little damage, the Brute pitches over, and you’ll unlock the Brute Force trophy and achievement.
Screenshot by GameSkinny
This puts the Brute in the odd position of being a “stasis sink” as opposed to an ammo sink. On a first run through Dead Space, the risk that a Brute might suddenly appear is enough justification to keep a stasis pack in your inventory for emergencies, as well as keeping your stasis unit recharged whenever possible.
Brutes will occasionally appear throughout the rest of the game, and they typically appear under circumstances where you can’t outrun or avoid them. The strategy against them is typically always the same: back off and freeze them, then circle around behind them and blast their nodules until they fall over.
It’s also worth noting that high explosives, when available, mess a Brute’s whole world right up. You can drop a Brute in seconds if you have the chance to throw a red fuel tank at it with kinesis.
Important note: Brutes typically drop either a Power Node or a small fortune in credits, but you have to stomp them once they’re dead for the loot to fall out. Make sure to double-tap any Brute you kill. And with that, you know how to defeat a Brute in Dead Space. For more tips, head over to our guides hub for the remake.
Featured image by GameSkinny.
