Dead Space Extraction – hands-on

The tempo increases further when you invite a friend along for the ride. A second player can jump in and out of the action at will, and the game auto-adjusts the difficulty level to compensate. Teamwork is more of a concern in Extraction than in most games of this ilk. The players share a single health bar, for starters, so there’s a vested interest in keeping each other alive, and ammunition is also shared. But it goes further than that – since the enemies are beefier in co-op, players have to actively plan and co-ordinate their attacks. This was something we learned very quickly when we were re-united with an old friend from the original Dead Space, the Brute.

Those who have waged battle with these gargantuans before will recall that their entire upper bodies are encased in impenetrable fortresses of scaly horribleness, and getting in a good shot on their vulnerable underbits is difficult at best. This is even truer in Extraction, where your only opportunity to get a hit in is when you’re fleeing from one of its bull-like charges. Thus, it becomes necessary to formulate a game plan.

We managed to survive the ordeal by working out a routine where one player zapped the Brute with their Stasis (an energy blast that slows the enemy’s movements significantly, but recharges slowly), while the other concentrated on getting the angles of the shots right as we passed him in the corridor.

There are plenty of moments where players have to put their heads together. If you’ve seen the E3 footage you’ll be familiar with the section where one player has to repair a lift shaft by tracing a circuit board with the Wii pointer while the other desperately attempts to keep a pack of drooling Necromorphs at bay, and there are plenty of set-pieces like this throughout the campaign mode. One we were lucky enough to experience took place in a murky Megavent infested by aliens. Here, the players have to combine forces to make an impromptu barricade using a few planks of wood and their trusty rivet guns. It’s a clever little segment that makes good use of the Wii controller without descending into minigame farce.

All that aside, however, there’s definitely a competitive side to Extraction. At the end of each level the game throws up a frightening number of statistics that leave you in no doubt as to who the weak link in the team is.

Although the Campaign mode is lengthy (we counted at least ten missions), Visceral Games hope that the bulk of the replay value will come from Challenge mode, which enables players to revisit levels to beat their high scores. In this mode, waves of Necromorphs generate randomly, so each playthrough will be different. Visceral Games are looking at ways to spice up Challenge mode even further, with Papoutsis stating that their proposals are “heavily influenced by Mario Kart”. What could this mean? Random weapon generators? Yoshi popping up to egg alien scum? You, er, heard it here first.

The version we played had just hit Alpha status (the preliminary testing and balancing stage), but even at this early stage, it’s apparent that Visceral have created one of the better looking games we’ll see during the Wii’s lifespan. You couldn’t call it beautiful (after all, most of the enemies look like six-month-old turkey carcasses), but the fluid animation, robust environments and haunting lighting effects combine to spectacular effect. More importantly, Dead Space Extraction has the brains to match, and we were amazed by how well the experience complements that of the original.

With its mastery of pacing, and the ease at which it manages to balance arcade thrills with the feeling of foreboding that’s a necessity in this type of game, it appears than in Extraction, we may finally have the game that de-rails the on-rails shooter genre.

Jul 20, 2009