Review: Dead Space: Extraction (Wii)

A bold claim, but one that is easily founded once you spend time back on the stricken Ishimura spaceship. Set before the events of the first game, Extraction takes you on a wild ride showing you really what happened aboard the ship and on the planet below before Isaac’s arrival. As a light gun game does, you’re shepherded along a set route, though at times it never feels like it. The way the camera reacts is far more human than any other game in the genre before it. The gliding motion is gone replaced with a feeling of clear footsteps, getting knocked down showcases this more than ever as you witness your characters hands going up to protect yourself as you waggle furiously in the hope of escape.

If there’s one complaint that can be levelled at the original Dead Space is that for you never really felt like you were controlling an engineer. Isaac being far more efficient handling firearms than you’d expect him to be, that and the fact that we can’t really remember him doing much engineering. Unless pressing a few switches counts. This is a different. While throughout the course of the story (separated in chapters) you’ll switch between various characters most of the time you’ll be behind the eyes of an engineer and this time you’ll actually have tools and panels to fix. It does come in the form of a simple little game, basically having to solder a straight line between each connection without touching the sides, it’s still nevertheless a tense affair when you have a bunch of monsters bearing down on your position. It seems to play with the characters sanity too. You’ll see things that aren’t really there and often they’ll start mumbling to themselves. Made more effective by the mainly good voice acting on offer.

Rather than being a just a shooter with the Dead Space stapled on, the developers have done a fantastic job making sure everything feels like it’s part of the same universe. Not just in the environment (you do revisit certain areas and characters), but the way it actually plays. Alternate firing modes for each weapons and upgrades, the stasis being able to freeze enemies, the kinesis so you can grab items and the zero-g environments. Each one is present and works brilliantly.

A minor annoyance with Extraction is that it seems completely at odds with the usual pick up and play mentality of a light gun shooter. It is at first quite slow moving, with the developers keen on really ramping up the atmosphere before they unleash all sorts of monsters upon you. What doesn’t help is that each chapter is really rather long, some taking us around the fifteen to twenty minute mark. Despite the game saving at regular intervals in case you die, quit the game completely and you’ll have to start the entire level again. We found this out the hard way. It’s a minor quarrel though in an otherwise fantastic experience.

Unlike other light gun shooters Extraction is the first we’ve actually returned to straight after completion. There’s a great amount of content, challenge modes become unlocked featuring wave after wave of enemies to dispatch and there’s also a nice little animated comic you can watch, the same one that was released on the Xbox Live Marketplace. This acting before and alongside the plot of Extraction. Not to mention star ratings that get given out at the end of each chapter, so bettering them also adds to what you get out of the game.

A great technical achievement. The game looks and sounds great as well as furthering a genre that seemed destined to be stuck in limbo. So in short, it’s a must have for everyone.

Rating: 9 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver