Pros: Great story and presentation.
Cons: Short. Problematic co-op mode.
When I started playing the rail shooter Dead Space: Extraction, I was instantly riveted by the game’s jittery camera work, intriguing story and exhilarating action. Yet, two days after completing the game I barely remember it. Why is that?
The Basics: A Rail Shooter With a Little Extra
I was intrigued when I heard Electronic Arts was coming out with a Wii prequel to last year's well receieved Dead Space for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, but disappointed when I saw that rather than making the game a third person game like the original, Extraction was to be yet another Wii rail shooter. Rail shooters are fun enough, but as Capcom proved with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, they pale in comparison with the more loosely structured action games common to other platforms and sorely lacking on the Wii.
My disappointment lasted until I started playing Extraction. After that, my complaints were replaced by excitement, curiosity and creeping dread. Because the game is, without question, the most original, innovative and engaging rail shooter I’ve ever played.
A rail shooter is a game in which the player has virtually no control over their avatar’s movement. The game funnels you through a specific path, stopping from time to time to unleash hordes of enemies that you must shoot like wooden ducks in a shooting gallery. Kill them all and you start moving again.
Rail shooters are ideal for the Wii, whose remote functions far better than the light gun peripherals used on other platforms; arguably the Wii has saved the genre.
Still, the move, shoot, move, shoot formula is inherently less interesting than the free exploration and strategic combat found in more open games. And it is wonderful to see how Extraction manages to bypass or lessen these shortcomings, offering something that is still just move-shoot-move-shoot but feels like more than that.
The Story: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
The game begins with the discovery in a mining colony on the planet Aegis VII of a “Marker,” an artifact with significance for a religious cult called the Unitologists. It isn’t clear in the game what the Unitologists believe, nor what they expect from the Marker, but the Marker itself certainly seems to be bad news: its discovery coincides with the breakdown of civilization amidst mass suicides and homicides.
The story is told from the first person viewpoints of various characters caught up in the madness. Constantly under attack by a steady stream of crazed people and, soon, hideous monsters that look like they emigrated from a Silent Hill game, these characters useweaponized miner’s tools to survive. While dealing with the insanity of their peers, these characters are themselves descending into madness. Players moving down a dark corridor will hear whispery voices urging them to help the Marker (it’s never clear how) or have visions of an alien language. Companions will suddenly begin to mutter that something is calling them, which is generally a sign that they will soon lose their minds and attack you.
In an interesting narrative device, the story uses a woman named Lexine to connect the playable characters; everyone you control interacts with her. Unfortunately, Lexine isn’t especially interesting; ideally, non-playable, central characters should be as memorable as Half-Life 2’s Alex, but Lexine has very little personality.
While the characters are underdeveloped clichés, the story itself is gripping, an edge of your seat thriller with some interesting twists.
Gameplay: Some Tweaks to the Formula, Beautifully Gift Wrapped
The game is wonderfully atmospheric, using a shaky hand-held camera visual style that adds to the eeriness of Extraction’s dark, rundown buildings and eerie underground tunnels. The sound design is also excellent, with unnerving ambient noise broken up by the howls of monsters and the convincing sounds of weapon fire. This is one of the best looking and sounding games on the Wii.
Underneath the fantastic presentation this is still a fairly straightforward rail shooter, but it has added a few interesting ideas. You have the kinetic ability to pull distant objects towards you; you can even catch objects thrown by monsters and hurl them back. You have a stasis tool that lets you slow time, freezing a monster in its tracks. There are also a few places where you must rivet makeshift barricades.
The game uses a limb-specific approach to combat. The best way to kill anything is to lop off a couple of appendages; nothing will die just because you blast its head off with rivet gun; you’ll need to take at least one more arm off as well.
The weakest part of Extraction involves computer hacking. This is done through a mini-game in which you must follow a line with your cursor. It is more annoying than entertaining, but fortunately does not take up a lot of time.
Co-Op Play
Extraction also supports co-op play, so I invited my friend Matt over to test it out. Matt seemed less enamored of the game than I was, spending a lot of time making wry commentary on the story (“well, now that we’ve got out of there I’m sure everything will be alright and there won’t be any more monsters”) and complaining about the hacking mini-game and the journals you could find and read (he wanted audio journals, although I later discovered audio journals that, because they played only through the Wii remote’s speaker, were virtually unintelligible). He also seemed to find it endlessly amusing to shoot his fellow combatants, although they were unaffected.
A more serious problem with co-op mode is that at times Matt and I were at odds with one another. We had a terrible time riveting a barricade because one of us would keep moving the camera away from the spot another was trying to rivet.
I’m not saying co-op mode is bad, I’m just suggesting you might want to play through the game once by yourself before inviting any friends over.
