Game Spotlight: Dead Space: Extraction

I do admit that I’ve been posting up a lot of Game Spotlight entries for Wii titles lately and I really should focus on some more 360 and PS3 games, but I think I should get this game out of the way since I have already posted up an entry about the original Dead Space.

The first game in the series gave us sights and sounds that created quite the atmospheric dark and lonely experience. If you didn’t have a huge HDTV, a Dolby Digital capable surround sound system and a room where you could turn the lights out, draw the curtains and sit in the pitch black darkness with only the glow of the TV in front of you, then you weren’t experiencing the game the way it really is meant to be played.

On the other hand, Dead Space: Extraction is an entirely different beast to the original…

Dead Space as a series has certain expectations to live up to as well as a style and atmosphere it must abide to. The second game in the series, Dead Space: Extraction must still be true to the original despite the differing gameplay genre and the very different platform that it has been released on.

When EA announced that Dead Space would come to Wii, the first thing that came to the minds of Wii fans was that it would be a port/remake of the original game, in other words, a second coming of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. Outrage followed as more details came to light and the game was confirmed to be a rail shooter, or what EA likes to describe as a “guided first person shooter”… of course, few people bought into the idea.

Judging by the sales of this game, it seems to me that the only people who ended up buying it are the few people who own/have played and finished the first Dead Space and have a Wii. Unfortunately, the amount of people who fall into that group is quite small so the sales for Dead Space: Extraction are so bad that an employee of Visceral Games has openly admitted his disappointment about it, as well as Wii as a platform for “mature” games. But just because it’s a game the sold badly, is it a bad game?

Dead Space: Extraction is a prequel to Dead Space and allows you to directly experience the events that lead up right to the very beginning of the original game. It’s your average survival horror movie told from a first person perspective complete with lots of camera shake. You have your typical survivors with your typical survivor horror script and your well known stereotypical characters of the genre. It also happens to be, for long periods of time, very uneventful. Through a lot of the levels there is a lot of story to be told, however during most of these moments you really don’t have anything to shoot… which, when it comes to a on-rails shooter game… can be a bit of a problem. Luckily Dead Space has a Challenge mode that allows players to see how long they can survive hordes of Necromorphs to make up for the lack of them during heavier story moments in the story mode… Oh, another thing about the story and something I must stress is that Dead Space: Extraction contains A LOT of spoilers that will definitely ruin the original game for anyone who hasn’t played it before playing this game.

Seriously, if you haven’t played the first Dead Space, you really should avoid playing Extraction… and that in itself is part of the problem mentioned earlier. This is a game that was clearly made to please fans of the first game. I loved playing through Extraction for the sake of the story itself, in fact, as soon as I finished it I got a strong urge to start a new game of the original Dead Space to continue the story where Extraction left off from. With that in mind, it does seem self defeating for the developers to release this game on a platform that doesn’t actually have the original game released on it.

The presentation is pretty well done, despite the limitations of Wii, the visuals and styling held up pretty strongly and felt just right enough to pass as a Dead Space game, of course watching the game in motion is better than viewing the screenshots to really get that sense so I’ll finish this off with the trailer shown back in E3 2009 of Extraction.