Last night, I rented Dead Space Extraction for the Wii. I was not expecting TOO much from a rail shooter for the Wii. In fact, I was not expecting much out of a Wii title in general.
Dead Space Extraction is a prequel to one of my favorite games ever, Dead Space, which came out last year for the XBox 360, PS3 and PC. It takes place prior to the events of the first game on the Ishimura, a planet cracker class space barge, set out to extract a large chunk of Ageis VII. During extraction on the planet, Engineers found what is known as a "Marker", a large stone with mystical powers which start to affect the planet side team psychologically. A group of religious fanatics known as Unitologists believe it to be a holy relic which will bring about an age of enlightenment. So, even though everyone knows that the Marker is making them crazy, these Unitologists force the crew to extract the Marker from its resting place and bring it into the planet side station, eventually carting it up to the Ishimura.
Needless to say, everyone on the planet side goes crazy and starts killing themselves and others. The original Dead Space game covers the events of a rescue crew of the ship Kellion and their attempts to help those on the Ishimura. Extraction covers the events leading up to the Kellion's arrival, from the moment the Marker is extracted from the ground, to the moment the Kellion attempts to make radio broadcast to board the Ishimura.
The Good:
So, Extraction was released on the Wii, and many people were concerned that the Wii could not provide the graphics of the original game; as a result the title would suffer. I must say that from the minute I started playing, I was amazed at how well the Visceral team has been able to optimize the Wii graphics engine to render the environment of Dead Space. It felt like I was in the same environments when the game re-visits areas of the ship that you visit in the original. Granted, if both areas were placed side by side, you would see a major difference in texture qualities, dynamic lighting, and overall cleanness and detail in the environments. However as an homage to the original on an inferior system, it does alright.
Game play of Extraction was interesting, and surprisingly fun. I played through the game with some friends while drinking some beers, and the game provided enough challenge at even the easiest of game difficulties to allow a slightly intoxicated person to have a good time, but not feel like he/she were getting ripped off by cheesy deaths. Harder difficulties required much better motor skills and forced us to be more on our game as far as quick reloads and ammunition management were concerned.
Ammunition in the game does not come cheap, there were many times where my partner and I were out of ammo. Reduced to using the Rivet Gun to kill most monsters and to closely watch our stasis meters to avoid being hit by enemies. Also, I have to mention that it is amazing how well they recreated the weapons from the first game, from the Ripper, to the Line Gun. Each was wonderfully adapted to the Wii controls, using the tilted "gangster" style shooting to enable secondary fire. Weapon swapping was instantaneous which made picking the right weapon for the right monster quick and painless. Weapon swapping is handled by moving the analog control on the nun-chuck controller in one of the four primary directions.
Collecting items in Extraction is actually an enjoyable experience, especially in co-op play. Health is shared between players, making it not a competition but more of a relief when your partner picks up a Large Health Pack when you are low on health. Ammunition is not shared in Extraction, which I would not expect it to be, but weapon pickups and weapon upgrades are, allowing both you and your partner to gain more fire power and strength together.
Finally, I think that even though this was a prequel, something I usually dread in video game plot lines, Visceral did a wonderful job telling a story that, although is known, was still a bit vague in the minds of the original game's players. Most of the characters were new, while some were characters from the original whom played key parts in the story of the first game. Visceral, I believe, did a great job in incorporating known events, viewed from a different perspective. The events on Aegis VII were horrific and terrifying, and something that was not covered much in the first game. This game provides a great look at those events, from the moment the Marker is extracted, to the crashed ship leaving the shuttle bay, an event that was covered in the animated graphic novel series which was released at the time of the original title. Other events, are unique to this games play experience, some environments that you never see in the original are portrayed with great detail, such as the sewers of the Ishimura, and some of the areas on planet Aegis VII which you do not get to spend much time in during the original game.
The Bad:
So that brings us to what I didn't like about the game. Keep in mind that I am a bit jaded, I have played MANY survival horror games as well as arcade rail shooter games which, I think makes me a bit critical when it comes to what I think makes a good scary game.
Shaky Cam, there were many times where I felt like I was on a really really bumpy roller coaster. The camera moved far too much in some areas, reasonably since the game is set in a first person perspective and the character you are playing as is frantically searching around for some noise or looking at some sort of rubble debris. However, sometimes it felt like it was only to allow us as the players to pick up some item that we were only given about 1/10th of a second to pickup. Parts of the shaky cam areas that I disliked the most were when you are crawling around in the maintenance tunnels of the Ishimura. These times it felt like you were tumbling really fast for no reason and it was quite disorienting.
Target Cursors in the game were far too big and far to bright. The environment of Dead Space is dark, the creatures textures are dark reds, and there are many many shadows that envelop corners of the scenes. Having large bright cursors tended to make seeing what it was I was shooting very difficult. This is probably my number one complaint about the game. Sometimes I felt like i was just shooting in the general direction of the creature and if i blew off limbs, well then I got lucky.
While playing, collecting weapons from the first game is nostalgic, seeing as most are from the original game. However, one weapon in particular was my favorite from the original, the Ripper. A gun that used telekinesis to hold a spinning saw blade in mid air so that it could be used to hack apart necromorphs. Originally an all around enjoyable experience. Yet, in Extraction, this weapon, although still one of my favorites, was annoyingly buggy. Even when the only thing between my saw blade and a necromorph was processed digital air, the blade would still stay out of reach of the necromorph; wasting precious necromorphic slaughter time.
Not, enough boss fights was another issue. The game is only 10 chapters long, and not every level has a boss fight. Sometimes boss fights are really really good and sometimes they suck, and sometimes they are the only reason to play a game. None of these were true for Extraction. At best the few boss fights that there are, are mildly enjoyable, others are too simple but still alright.The boss fights of Extraction do not hold up to the original Dead Space, such as the Zero-G battle with the large plant-like creature in the Original game. In this fight, you could run around the outside ring of the hull while avoiding tentacles and shooting at big orange bulbous alien parts. Something like that would have been somewhat feasible in Extraction, and would have lent itself to a better end of level event in my opinion.
Finally, being on rails, it really pulled much of the "Horror" out of the title for me. Granted, the game still has its moments, where things pop out at you and scare the crap out of you, some sequences even remind me of the classic horror game Eternal Darkness, for the Gamecube (expect a replay review of that coming soon). Since the marker makes people hallucinate, visions of things that are not there, or things that are but not as they appear, makes for a great scare or mind bending feeling. Yet, overall, this game was not nearly as scary as the original Dead Space. It is hard to place a specific reason for this, I think perhaps being on rails it makes it feel more like a ride at Disney Land, riding a cam through a haunted house. Perhaps too, that since you do not have to control your characters movements, it is simply not as challenging as when having to avoid large numbers of space zombies while attempting to shoot at them in a third person perspective, as a result, much of the suspense is lost.
Overall:
In the end, I did enjoy playing Dead Space Extraction, it was also one of the few games that I have beaten in a single evening. The other, most recently, was Umbrella Chronicles, another rail horror title for the Wii. Overall, it took about 5 1/2 hours to beat the game on its easiest setting, we only died twice. Based on what we played of the hardest difficulty, the game would not last much longer and only due to more frequent deaths. I have to say it was a fun rental, due to the ability of having two players play at once, yet I could never recommend that someone buy this game at its $50 dollar price tag. The game play is not captivating enough to warrant too many multiple re-plays, and if you feel like you want to play it again, a couple dollar rental fee is much better than $50/number of times you run through the game per play.
If you have played the original Dead Space, I do recommend that if you have a Wii, that you take the 5 1/2 hours, buy some brews (if your of age that is), and spend an evening with the lights dimmed low, the sound system turned up, and a friend or two to go out and blast some necromorphs with. I think you will be fairly happy you did.
