Future Classic: Dead Space: Extraction
Nintendo’s Wii might be best associated with the casual market and was seen as ‘child friendly’, but this chilling horror shooter from 2009 certainly wasn’t suitable for kids
Darran champions this great Wii prequel
THE BACKGROUND
Revisiting Dead Space’s launch reveals just how much faith Electronic Arts had in its new franchise. To drum up interest ahead of the game’s October 2008 release, the publisher debuted a comic prequel series in March. This set up the events of Dead Space: Downfall, an animated movie which came out mere weeks after the game’s launch. This was another prequel which concluded with Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke’s arrival at the doomed USG Ishimura. Keen to add further lore to its new franchise, EA announced yet another prequel, this time a spin-off Wii game called Dead Space: Extraction in April 2009 – four months ahead of its September 2009 release date. It was clear that the publisher was out for blood. THE GAME
Extraction’s development, like Dead Space’s, was handled by Visceral Games, with additional help from Eurocom. Realising that a straight port of Dead Space’s design would be unsuitable for Nintendo’s unique console, the devs instead played to the system’s strengths, and that meant motion controls made up a big part of Extraction’s mechanics.
Rather than Dead Space’s Resident Evil 4-style third-person viewpoint, Extraction instead utilises a first-person perspective and is effectively an on-rails lightgun shooter, sharing similarities with Capcom’s Wii release Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. While it features plenty of shooting, narrative is the focus of Visceral’s shooter, and in this aspect it excels as it both outstrips the solid script of Dead Space and gives you further insight into how Isaac Clarke’s grisly adventure became such a horrific nightmare. While Extraction does work as a standalone game, it’s ultimately a companion piece for fans of the original sci-fi survival-horror, answering some of the questions that would have
come from playing through Dead Space, while presenting plenty of its own.
One of the strengths of Extraction is that its story is told from the viewpoint of several characters, including Sam Caldwell, a member of the mining team that retrieves a mysterious artefact known only as ‘The Marker’, to detective Nathan Mcneill and doctor Catherine Howell. It’s a solid way of unfolding the plot, particularly as not everyone manages to escape the carnage they find themselves in, so you never know who’s really ‘safe’. Central to Extraction’s plot is Lexine Weller, the girlfriend of Sam, who proves to be a critical part of the story. As with Dead Space, Extraction’s story is further enhanced by the collecting of logs that come in written, audio and video forms. In a nice touch, audio logs play through the Wiimote’s speaker, adding more atmosphere to Visceral’s macabre classic.
Despite its commendable focus on being story-driven, Visceral still realised the strength of solid game design and crammed Extraction full of satisfying mechanics; this is most notable when it comes to the excellent gunplay. Regardless of which character you play as, you’ll often be in control of the same weapons that featured so predominately in Dead Space. Favourites like the versatile Plasma Cutter and flamethrower return – along with newcomers such as the P-sec Pistol – and you’ll have to focus on dismembering your foes just like in the original game. In a neat touch, the weapons’ secondary fire modes remain, cleverly activated by turning the Wiimote on its side. Key Dead Space abilities such as Stasis and Kinesis also return as
well, and work extremely well with the new firstperson perspective.
In addition to handling most of the game’s combat, the Wiimote also activates Extraction’s ’Glow Worm’ – a light source the characters use to navigate the dark corridors of the Ishimura which can be recharged with a shake of the stick. Controls aren’t entirely Wiimote-based however, with the Nunchuck add-on being used for crucial melee attacks, or to frantically shake off any enemies that have latched onto you. The beauty of these many mechanics and flourishes is that they genuinely enhance Extraction’s atmosphere, rather than turning it into just another ‘Wii waggle game’.
WHY IT’S A FUTURE CLASSIC Dead Space: Extraction may not be the first lightgun-style game to have a heavy emphasis on story-focused play, but it’s certainly one of the best available and the last 11 years has done nothing to diminish its impact within the genre. It’s a shining example of a team of developers being well aware of a system’s shortcomings, and doing everything they can to ensure they instead play to its strengths. It’s highly possible that the Wii could have handled a game like Dead Space, but it’s also obvious that it would have been compromised in ways outside of just having lower graphical fidelity. Extraction might not break new boundaries or remould its genre like some of the games we’ve featured within this section, but what it does do is deliver an absorbing, highly satisfying adventure that becomes almost impossible to put down.