Dead Space: Extraction

I was recently invited to join this blog as an occasional contributor, and I gladly accepted. If there's one thing I love, it's ranting about other things I love less.

I figure for my first post, I'll take a swing at a game I've been playing recently, that reminded me of other games in its genre that I like significantly less. I'm talking about Dead Space: Extraction.

A "horror" rail shooter for the Wii, it embodies something I really hate. Which is watering down the essence of what made a game successful and then trying to transfer that into an entirely different genre and failing to do so.

In a purely technical sense, they took out everything that made the original game a success and attempted to put it into something mediocre. Let's outline below what made Dead Space, the original, such a great game:

One of the key points of the original Dead Space was the sense of atmosphere. It's one of the few games I praise for not having a musical soundtrack. The point of the game is that your interactions with people are utterly limited. Only a handful of times in the game do you have anyone within even a close proximity to you. The sense of utter aloneness is key to making the game feel right. The level design is amazing, in my opinion, as well. Cramped corridors, lots of vents, cold metal. It all intentionally looks the same, to increase how alone and lost you can feel. But mostly it was the enemies. Enemies could come at you at any time, from anywhere, and with no warning. It was jump-shock horror.

So, what does Extraction do?

Instead of being alone, you have between 2 and 4 yammering NPCs with you at all time, talking in your ear verbosely while doing nothing to help you shoot people. Enemies come at a predictable pace, at predictable points (always the same spots), and are fairly boring. And it's a rail shooter. Sure, once in a while you get the option to choose between two paths, but one is usually a path to bonus goods, and then you're right back on the rail to go through the rest of the level.

Basically, Extraction takes away the aloneness, the ability to get lost, and the randomly spawning enemies. What are you left with? A bland shooter with a fancy coat if paint over it.

This is, truthfully, much the same issue I had with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and Call of Duty: World at War. Railshooters are fun, but when you're gutting a game series to force one into its corpse, turning it into some godawful machination, wearing the skin of something you once enjoyed, you're going too far.

And that's my two cents on that.