Shockingly competent.
Stop and ask yourself if, conceptually, a rail shooter spin-off of Dead Space exclusively for the Wii sounds like a good idea. It shouldn’t. It’s the kind of pitch that, by all rights, should have been thrown out of whatever boardroom it was first floated in. An M-Rated game on a console for children, based on a series that only existed on the competition’s hardware, and being made by the original developers despite being a completely different genre? Get real. Consumers agreed; there’s a reason that this game only pushed four-digit copies in its release week. But if you’re one of the nine thousand true sickos who heard that premise and thought it sounded promising, then welcome aboard. I did too, and you’ll be pleased to know that what’s here isn’t just passable, but also somehow manages to clear the Herculean task of being pretty alright.
While the business decisions behind putting this game out may be pretty questionable, I’m not an EA shareholder, so I don’t really give a shit. What I do care about is the fact that, from a gameplay perspective, turning Dead Space into a rail shooter kind of makes sense. What was Dead Space originally, if not an action-horror shooter with a focus on extremely tight, precise hotspots that needed to be aimed at? It almost sounds like a better idea to make it into a light gun game than to bind that concept to a gamepad. Of course, the primary struggle was going to be in developing a tight, universal pacing to be followed while also keeping a lot of the heft of the original combat mechanics, and Dead Space Extraction mostly succeeds in this.
The main complaint that I imagine most people are going to have is that this game is slow. It is ridiculously slow. A full playthrough is probably going to take you around six hours, which is pretty breezy by the standards of most games, but may as well be Pride and Prejudice when you compare it to other rail shooters. The House of the Dead 2 is an arcade quarter-muncher that only takes half an hour to beat; Sin and Punishment is an often-grueling affair designed from the bottom up for at-home play, and even that’ll cap out at around two hours tops. Six hours is a monstrous length, and a lot of that time is going to be spent with your character standing around gormlessly while the supporting cast looks into camera to talk at you like you’re Gordon Freeman. Shifting the perspectives around to multiple characters does pull a lot of weight in keeping things from getting too stale, though, and the game does manage to wrap itself up in time before it fully overstays its welcome.
Where Extraction really shines, however, is in how the characters of the weapons have transitioned to the rail shooter format. Dead Space’s original lineup of guns had a lot of personality to them, with each one serving a very strict purpose; the Plasma Cutter being an exceptionally strong all-rounder kind of invalidated most of its friends, but the Ripper still excelled in close-quarters, the Contact Beam worked to let you kill whatever you pointed it at so long as you could charge it up, and the Line Gun cleaved through packed enemies like three hundred amps through butter. All of these have been brought over faithfully into Extraction, with the only notable change being the reigning in of the Plasma Cutter and a few extra additions: the Rivet Gun is a heavy-but-bottomless single-shot projectile thrower, the P-Sec pistol works like your traditional spammy rail shooter handgun, and the Arc Welder is a chain lightning gun that cooks multiple enemies about as well as the phrase “chain lightning gun” should imply. Upgrades that you find in the wild seem to only affect ammo capacity, which is a little boring, but it’d be tough to think of a better way to implement them. Besides, you activate the alt-fires in this by turning the Wii remote sideways, which is so stupidly cool that I can’t help but love how the guns are handled. This is the kind of game begging for a Plasma Cutter peripheral that you can pop the Wiimote into.
It’s the kind of game that I can’t imagine anyone having an opinion at all more critical than “eh, it’s okay”. It’s simple, and a little over-long, but what’s here is perfectly serviceable. I’ll probably never play it again, if only because of how much downtime there is; that might be a killing blow for something in this genre, considering how replayability tends to be extremely valued in a rail shooter, but I don’t mind it being absent here. What’s here is solid, and that’s enough for me to be satisfied with it.
We ought to go back to a time where studios the size of Visceral could take a shot at making something out of their comfort zone without immediately going out of business.
Stop and ask yourself if, conceptually, a rail shooter spin-off of Dead Space exclusively for the Wii sounds like a good idea. It shouldn’t. It’s the kind of pitch that, by all rights, should have been thrown out of whatever boardroom it was first floated in. An M-Rated game on a console for children, based on a series that only existed on the competition’s hardware, and being made by the original developers despite being a completely different genre? Get real. Consumers agreed; there’s a reason that this game only pushed four-digit copies in its release week. But if you’re one of the nine thousand true sickos who heard that premise and thought it sounded promising, then welcome aboard. I did too, and you’ll be pleased to know that what’s here isn’t just passable, but also somehow manages to clear the Herculean task of being pretty alright.
While the business decisions behind putting this game out may be pretty questionable, I’m not an EA shareholder, so I don’t really give a shit. What I do care about is the fact that, from a gameplay perspective, turning Dead Space into a rail shooter kind of makes sense. What was Dead Space originally, if not an action-horror shooter with a focus on extremely tight, precise hotspots that needed to be aimed at? It almost sounds like a better idea to make it into a light gun game than to bind that concept to a gamepad. Of course, the primary struggle was going to be in developing a tight, universal pacing to be followed while also keeping a lot of the heft of the original combat mechanics, and Dead Space Extraction mostly succeeds in this.
The main complaint that I imagine most people are going to have is that this game is slow. It is ridiculously slow. A full playthrough is probably going to take you around six hours, which is pretty breezy by the standards of most games, but may as well be Pride and Prejudice when you compare it to other rail shooters. The House of the Dead 2 is an arcade quarter-muncher that only takes half an hour to beat; Sin and Punishment is an often-grueling affair designed from the bottom up for at-home play, and even that’ll cap out at around two hours tops. Six hours is a monstrous length, and a lot of that time is going to be spent with your character standing around gormlessly while the supporting cast looks into camera to talk at you like you’re Gordon Freeman. Shifting the perspectives around to multiple characters does pull a lot of weight in keeping things from getting too stale, though, and the game does manage to wrap itself up in time before it fully overstays its welcome.
Where Extraction really shines, however, is in how the characters of the weapons have transitioned to the rail shooter format. Dead Space’s original lineup of guns had a lot of personality to them, with each one serving a very strict purpose; the Plasma Cutter being an exceptionally strong all-rounder kind of invalidated most of its friends, but the Ripper still excelled in close-quarters, the Contact Beam worked to let you kill whatever you pointed it at so long as you could charge it up, and the Line Gun cleaved through packed enemies like three hundred amps through butter. All of these have been brought over faithfully into Extraction, with the only notable change being the reigning in of the Plasma Cutter and a few extra additions: the Rivet Gun is a heavy-but-bottomless single-shot projectile thrower, the P-Sec pistol works like your traditional spammy rail shooter handgun, and the Arc Welder is a chain lightning gun that cooks multiple enemies about as well as the phrase “chain lightning gun” should imply. Upgrades that you find in the wild seem to only affect ammo capacity, which is a little boring, but it’d be tough to think of a better way to implement them. Besides, you activate the alt-fires in this by turning the Wii remote sideways, which is so stupidly cool that I can’t help but love how the guns are handled. This is the kind of game begging for a Plasma Cutter peripheral that you can pop the Wiimote into.
It’s the kind of game that I can’t imagine anyone having an opinion at all more critical than “eh, it’s okay”. It’s simple, and a little over-long, but what’s here is perfectly serviceable. I’ll probably never play it again, if only because of how much downtime there is; that might be a killing blow for something in this genre, considering how replayability tends to be extremely valued in a rail shooter, but I don’t mind it being absent here. What’s here is solid, and that’s enough for me to be satisfied with it.
We ought to go back to a time where studios the size of Visceral could take a shot at making something out of their comfort zone without immediately going out of business.