Thereâs a lot about Dead Space that makes sense as a rail shooter. There are a lot of pop-up scares, a lot of atmosphere, and that whole âgoing crazyâ aspect that they can milk. There were just parts of Dead Space that werenât scary because we were divided from the âactionâ by always being able to see this faceless, heavily-armored and extremely competent avatar. So moving the scenario to a first-person affair with no camera control was a great idea to let gamers soak in the horror.
Well, it tries, at least. Maybe it was me, with my little TV, my insistence to play with the lights on and my genre-savviness, but I just didnât find myself greatly terrified, just occasionally startled. Once you got deep into the game, the feeling wasnât âoh god itâs the necromorphs!â but more âOh, itâs these jerks again.â Dead Space just canât seem to realize that pacing is important to the horror genre, and our heroes really shouldnât have a flamethrower.
Revisit the Ishimura after the jump.
The events of Dead Space: Extraction happen in the hours before the arrival of the USG Kellion. You following a tag team of four; a detective, a security officer, an executive and aâ¦girl, who attempt to escape the savagery aboard the Ishimura. As you imagine, it involves basically fapping around the ship and shooting monsters, often in areas that look eerily familiar.
As is the custom, Iâll avoid spoilers, which should be easy because there arenât any. Extraction starts with a crew who interact with the thing that causes the whole debacle, an object you donât even know exists until halfway through the first game, and it just gets more obvious after that. Certain baddies from the first game just start popping up, apropos to nothing, and the majority of the mysteriesâ¦wellâ¦stay mysteries. They even tricked me into thinking Iâd get an explanation for a certain very creepy part of the first game, but no, it was just a pointless callback.
So, since the game is apparently unconcerned with expanding the mythos, letâs talk about the experience. Itâs definitely visceral (ha!), with the quirky camera being motivated by almost objective terror, and reality starting to seriously warp before your eyes the deeper you get into it. It works most of the time, although there are some moments where itâs obviously a game, where the enemies march out exactly when they are supposed to. It does a good job about making the experience at least creepy, even though there are a few parts that just drag.
But thatâs more a problem with the pacing, which is all over the place. You start off as youâd expect, just a normal day when things start going wrong. Then it suddenly switches to a month later with the main cast, and youâre in the eyes of the detective for the majority of time, until the later chapters where the point-of-view characters starts switching pretty much every chapter. This becomes a problem, as it becomes hard to believe when various cast members start teleporting all over the place. It also has a horrible habit of stretches with too much ammo and few enemies, followed by long stretches with no ammo and endless waves, and the most awkwardly placed boss fights Iâve seen in a while.
So, throughout this difficult and occasionally overly slow march through the Ishimura, youâre either shooting necromorphs, performing the story-breaking action of using your TK to grab stuff, or fixing things in the most obnoxious minigame ever. Youâll have a great choice of weapons, but you will spend the majority of your time with the flamethrower, because it is the only thing that quickly and effectively kills the majority of the monsters you fight, to a gamebreaking degree. Youâll only need a line gun of something similar when thereâs an enemy out of range, but even then theyâll occasionally come up and try to eat your face, so flamethrower time.
The flamethrower is also the only weapon that can kill an opponent using a very small amount of ammo, which is good when you can’t get any. Half of the ammo ends up being hidden behind locker doors or in vents that wouldn’t consider shooting, or visible on the screen for about half a second before the camera decides to turn away. You have to use your TK to grab it, and it needs to be right on in order to register. What this means is you’ll spend the majority of your time spamming the A button to have a chance to grab whatever object saunters into your vision, which can get awfully silly when you’re extending your transparent wang at the faces of the overly talkative NPCs trying to grab the ammo case that’s right behind them.
So, as you imagine, you run into a disjointed story with fake difficulty due to ammo supplies and poor pacing. A death warrant, if the game lacked charm, but even with these complaints, you’ve still got a good railshooter hiding in there. Once you cut away the bore of a story and hit up challenge mode, where it’s just waves of monsters that you need to shoot in the strategically accurate spot, a mechanic that was great fun in the original and even better when you have to actively aim. This is how the genre works, with a useful gun, an accurate hand, and a quick eye, and it’s about time that the Wii has started getting games that try to do just that. When Extraction tries to migrate some things and reinvent others is when it falls apart.
But it tried. It provides at least some entertaining creepiness, such as the multiple crazy hallucinations that screw with your propensity to not waste ammo, and moving through the claustrophobic ventillation that you’re almost always required to crawl through. The shooter aspect works fine, if a bit sticky on precision, and provides a wide enough variety of challenge so that you can enjoy playing without getting frustrated or go all out to see how you manage. It’s not incompetent by any means, just poorly put together, with an irrelavent plot and a rubberbanding experience. It might be worth it if you want to try a decent interesting shooter for the Wii, or if you want to see just how it hit the fan on the Ishimura. But it’s still a lackluster addition to the franchise.
