When I started playing Dead Space: Extraction, I wasn't expecting the amount of polish the main series has got, but I was still expecting a fairly decent game. It certainly starts off promising, with an interesting opening level that promises to tell a thoughtful story that takes place just before the first Dead Space. Indeed, the series sounds like it would work pretty well as an on-railsWhen I started playing Dead Space: Extraction, I wasn't expecting the amount of polish the main series has got, but I was still expecting a fairly decent game. It certainly starts off promising, with an interesting opening level that promises to tell a thoughtful story that takes place just before the first Dead Space. Indeed, the series sounds like it would work pretty well as an on-rails shooter. After the first level ends with a neat little twist, however, the game quickly became a slog to play through.
Dead Space: Extraction's biggest flaw is its enemy AI and cookie-cutter design; you'll usually find yourself fighting between two to five Necromorphs at a time, but once they close in, they're all happy to stand next to (or get stuck on) each other, with only one Necromorph willing to attack at a time. Only on rare occasions will you find some enemies with ranged attacks, but when this happens, it's more a pain than interesting variety of enemy placement. At times, the game doesn't know what enemy to focus the camera on, and on more than one occasion I found myself being pummeled by an enemy barely on screen as the camera focused on another enemy patiently standing a few steps away, waiting for me to kill his buddy before attacking. And despite the abundance of Necormorphs in the Dead Space universe, you'll unfortunately only find yourself fighting Slashers and Leapers most of the time.
Ammo and dismemberment is another big problem in this game - most on-rails shooters rely on their fast pace and shooting enemies as fast as possible, but Extraction does not know what it wants: it's happy to throw a lot of enemies at you but your weapons are slow and designed for severing their limbs than actual crowd-control. If you run low (or out) of ammo, you're stuck with a Rivet Gun, the only weapon with infinite ammo, but with only 7 shots (when fully upgraded) and a slow rate of fire, it's a poor excuse for even a back-up weapon. The bosses in this game were absolutely terrible because of the lack of ammo in the game. If they go on for too long, be prepared to run out of ammo and end up stuck with a weapon that isn't designed for the boss. As a word of advice, make sure to always keep a Pulse Rifle and/or P-Sec Pistol on you for the three bosses (from Chapter 6 onwards).
Everything here has been simplified compared to the main series - weapon upgrades are now simply notches that don't specify how they've upgraded the gun, and all the text logs have literally been lifted straight from the first Dead Space. The Challenge Mode that comes with the game is just awful; failing to adequately explain how its scoring system works, and with no online leaderboard functionality. Outside of trophies, there is literally no reason to play this uninspired, lackluster extra mode, and the developers that were stuck working on this could have been put to better use elsewhere.
Aside from this, the game is very easy, with enemies dropping health packs whenever you're low on health; your character will instantly use the health packs when you pick them up, so don't expect any tactics regarding health management here. In fact, what makes this game so tedious to play is that you'll be moving from one area to another, fighting off the many Necormorphs that assail you with whatever weapon you've been lumped with until you either reach the next area or one of your companions start to talk about something and crudely break whatever pace the game has going for it, with no risk of failure ever looming (outside of the aforementioned boss fights, anyway).
Levels range from ten minutes to half an hour long, and there's only ten of them. While the character interaction is one of the best things about the game, it does break up the pace of the levels (especially on repeat playthroughs) when characters spend several minutes blathering on and on, and the lack of a Restart Checkpoint option baffles me - if you run into a game-stopping glitch (I ran into three during my first playthrough!), you'll have to restart the entire level from the beginning!
What starts off as a promising game ends up as an extremely tedious, by-the-numbers, almost-no-thrills game to play. It has an interesting enough (if simple) plot, and admittedly there's a sense of enjoyment exploring the Ishimura again before Isaac arrives, but it's just... not fun to play. It certainly has its moments, and it's not all bad - don't get me wrong - but the negatives definitely outweigh the positives, and after completing the game all I could immediately recall were the parts that annoyed and frustrated me the most.… Expand
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