October 13, 2009 - As far as this reviewer is concerned, few games in this hardware generation were as fun and memorable as EA’s Dead Space. The combination of intense action, frightening atmosphere, light RPG elements, and fantastic universe all came together to create a gaming experience like few that I have ever experienced. Therefore, it was with great excitement and just a touch of trepidation that I took on the assignment to review this rail shooter Wii prequel.

Rather than shoehorn the original title or a new game on the ill-equipped Wii hardware, Extraction is built from the ground up to take advantage of all of the Wii’s strengths while sidestepping many of its weaknesses. As I stated above, this go around is a rail shooter, which means that you have little control over your character’s movements. Most of your game has you solely concerned with aiming your weapons with the Wii pointer. This decision could have resulted in a shallow disaster, but instead became a fantastic addition to the quickly growing Dead Space canon.

Extraction takes place in the few days before the events of the original title. While you ran headfirst into the ship which was overrun by the terrifying necromorph the first time, here you’ll see how the colony was originally overrun, how the infection spread to the ship, and generally experience first hand how the brown stuff hit the fan in the first place. While you’ll play most of the game from the eyes of security officer Nathan MacNeill, some of the game’s ten chapters will have you experiencing the action from the perspective of some other unique characters.

One area where this instalment trumps the original is in its cinematic presentation. Since the game unfolds at an entirely scripted pace, this has allowed the developers to put together a much tighter storyline that unfolds like some of the best Hollywood blockbusters. Actually, playing this game is like picking up an interactive season of Dead Space: The Series. Each chapter takes around 40 minutes to complete, and is jam packed with equal levels of dialogue, quiet moments, slow burning terror, and in your face action. Playing through this game for the first time will have you on the edge of your seat, but obviously won’t hold up quite as well upon repeated playthroughs. However, you may just find yourself revisiting the game every now and then just like you would a favourite horror movie. It’s funny, if the full motion video games of the mid nineties were this tightly made, maybe we’d have seen a lot more success come from those types of games.

Despite aiming with the Wii-mote pointer like so many other Wii-shooters, Extraction is not your average rail shooter with a Dead Space skin. Like the original, aiming for the head is a key to a quick death. The necromorphs must be dismembered before they’re down for the count, and blowing off limb after limb is still a grisly thrill. There’s many ways to accomplish this, and it all starts with the arsenal. Many favourites from the original make a triumphant return, including the flame thrower, the plasma cutter, and the ripper (a gun that hovers a floating saw blade that cuts off limbs at will). There are also a few new additions like a fairly useless pistol, an arc welder that shoots lightning and a sort-of grenade launcher. If you run out of ammo, you have a pea-shooter rivet gun that never runs out of ammo. Every gun also has a secondary fire mode, which is activated by simply twisting the remote on its side. There’s also an active reload mechanic much like the one found in Gears of War which has you pressing the button again to reload quicker.

You have a few other tricks in your bag beyond your arsenal. Kinesis and stasis both make a return for this go around. Kinesis essentially allows you grab faraway items like ammo, text logs, audio logs (which are heard by holding the wii-mote speaker to your ear), and weapons upgrades. Since you don’t have control of the camera, quick reflexes are required to make sure you’re able to grab the items before your character looks elsewhere. It won’t be long before you’re spamming the kinesis button over and over in between action scenes, which creates a bit of a immersion sucking moment when your party members are talking to you and don’t notice that you’re flinging your kinesis all over the place. A few quick moments that allow you to look around the environments are always used to grab items too. Stasis slows your enemies down to a crawl, which is essential for some of the flying or quicker necromorphs.