Where Dead Space terrifies, Extraction thrills. Lacking in the original’s atmosphere it makes up for it with satisfying gunplay and a cheesy but charming story. It’s one truly egregious sin is that it’s longer than it needs to be, especially after boarding the Ishimura. Fire fights drag on to an absurd degree as your character circles a room twice as enemies spawn in, instead of just leaving through an open door. Boss fights are also mechanically frustrating and longer than necessary.
All in all Dead Space Extraction makes for good arcade-y fun, but it’s not worth going through a second time.

I am not at all familiar with the rail shooter/light gun genre of games, I think my only real experience with them is playing those Terminator and Alien arcade cabinets at my local Dave n’ Busters at my friends birthday parties. So needless to say that my expectations for Dead Space: Extraction were very low; I expected it to be just an overall boring spin-off that shared some aesthetical similarities with its older sibling. It wasn’t until I booted up the game and saw that this was an in-house Visceral Games project, that I realized there might be more to this game than I initially suspected; and boy, was I right. Dead Space: Extraction not only coherently translates Dead Space’s atmosphere and aesthetic to an entirely linear experience, but also turns the Resident Evil 4 inspired combat into an arcade-like experience that uses the same mechanics and ideas, but in a much better way.

While personally I didn’t think the atmosphere in the first Dead Space was anything unique, I still recognize that it more than than effective for other people and appreciate all of the different facets that went into building that atmosphere; the sound design, art direction, and level design are all really great and make Dead Space stand out amongst its peers. But, the challenge that Dead Space: Extraction faced was taking all of those aspects that were used to create that sense of dread, and making it work in the much more linear and restrictive format of a rail shooter. The thing is though, the way Visceral went about doing this was not a one to one translation, but instead, a B-movie horror flick reinterpretation of those original ideas. Mind you, it is much more Evil Dead 1 than Army of Darkness, as in it still takes itself seriously, but that cheese is still very much there, almost in an ironic way. Firstly, the cast of characters that the story follows is much more colorful than the ones in Dead Space 1, with each character following typical horror movie tropes; McNeil is the rough and tough PI who doesn’t take shit from no one, Eckhardt is the coward turned traitor, Lexine is the damsel, and Weller is the bastard with a heart of gold. All of these characters are entertaining to follow and their chemistry with one another is honestly pretty fun, though some of the line deliveries from the voice actors are a little off sometimes, but I think this just adds to the endearing charm of this band of misfits. As well, I find it very funny that the entire structure and flow of the games story is the exact opposite of the first game; Extraction starts you out right where Dead Space ended, at the loading bay on the planet colony, and then proceeds to hit all the major set pieces from the first game, nearly beat for beat. It creates this cool situation where the player, assuming they have played Dead Space 1, knows what's coming, or at least they know how that area is going to play out; which I guess is just the nature of prequels, but I still find it cool nonetheless.

The combat also had to shift in order to accommodate the rail shooter genre, and similarly to the story and atmosphere, I think it works way better in this game. Dead Space 1 was very liberal with its use of the necromorphs, which is the norm for the horror game genre. But, what I ended up having a problem with is that Dead Space tried to have its cake and eat it too by having those traditional horror elements, but with combat that is comparable to Resident Evil 4 and 5. This doesn’t work because any tension that the game tries to build up is immediately dissolved once the player realizes that the guns and equipment available lets them absolutely make clowns out of the enemies. Extraction fixes this problem by fully embracing its RE4 roots and just sends droves upon droves of necromorphs, and just lets the player use their arsenal to its fullest extent. The plasma cutter is just as satisfying to use as it is in the first game, the force gun goes from being too good, to actually being used for its purpose as a “get off me” tool, and the flamethrower has gone from just ok, to being the most satisfying and effective weapon in the game; lighting hoards of necromorphs on fire when you get overwhelmed and watching the drop like flies is so much fun. There is even a new pistol that, while initially not sounding that good, ends up becoming a great workhorse tool because of how handy the alt fire is. All of this is elevated even more by the masterful use of the Wii Remotes motion controls; as expected from a light gun, the Wii Remote is used to aim and shoot at enemies, but the game also utilizes the controllers that I would have never expected. The joystick on the Nunchuk is what is used to switch weapons, and not the D-pad like I had originally expected; this creates a great sense of fluidity during combat encounters, making the swapping of weapons like second nature, rather than an inconvenience like it normally does. As well, I particularly like how, to switch to the alt fire of weapons, you tilt the Wii Remote to the side; much like how the Nunchuk makes the switching weapons smoother, this use of the motion controls makes the atl fires so much more usable because you can just switch to them effortlessly on the spot.

To close out, I would like to mention a couple of criticisms of the game. For a Wii game, it runs fine, it sometimes stutters slightly when there is an abundance of particle effects on screen, or when there are a lot of enemies. While I do overall like the use of motion controls, the way they are used for the power saw is just not good; much like how it operates in Dead Space, the weapon fires a buzz saw that the player can then parade around with and cut off necromorph limbs like a chainsaw. In Extraction it still functions like that, but the saw can also be moved along the Z axis, which doesn’t really work because it is very hard to tell how far or how close an enemy is on screen. Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed Dead Space: Extraction, it is a fun and innovative take on both Dead Space’s original genre, as well as the light gun/rail shooter format.

Written May 30, 2010

In the latest installment of Visceral Games' hit Dead Space series, Dead Space: Extraction has you playing through the events leading up to Isaac Clarke's arrival on the USG Ishimura in the original, but trades in the third person view point for a more cinematic on-rails experience EA refers to as a “guided shooter”.

Dead Space: Extraction has you playing through the eyes of various characters in their struggles from the extraction of the Red Marker on Aegis VII to a slight overlap with the original. All the characters you play seem to be suffering from a form of dementia brought on by the activation of the marker.

Although it is a rail shooter, EA's term does actually fit it well as there are a few parts where you have a choice of what path to take and the ability to look around at given points and pick up items, health and ammo packs, tape recordings, notes, etc. The pointer did seem to be a bit oversensitive and the camera had a nasty habity of whipping around without notice. Visceral put a bit of effort in the controls as the Ripper, for example can be moved forward and backward by moving the Wii Remote closer or farther from the screen.

Visceral even put much effort into one department most Wii developers have been skipping out on up until now: graphics. Saying Dead Space: Extraction is pretty would be an understatement. Extraction easily overshadows around 90% of the Wii library in terms of graphics. Shading is quite excellent and the textures surpass a lot of what I've seen from certain developers.

Extraction not only switches up the rail-shooter genre, but also changes what you've come to expect from a game on the Wii. Its graphics are good, and it fills in a lot of Dead Space's backstory, and even provides a good starting point for people to begin with the franchise in case they missed out on the original or don't have a platform to play it on.

a decently fun rail shooter that kinda overstays its welcome

its cool seeing the initial outbreak of the necromorphs but a lot of the time you're just not really doing anything as you watch the horrors of the ishimura unfold right before your eyes which fits the tone of the original Dead Space but it doesn't really suit the gameplay much here because you're not actually controlling your character

the game is split into 10 chapters that take about 20 minutes each but only like half of that is engaging with the gunplay

if you do play this i recommend short bursts of gameplay because you'll want to turn it off really early on if you decided to marathon it