You’d think a game like Dead Space: Extraction would have had something fundamentally wrong with it considering the sales numbers. As if the gameplay were some sort of cancerous growth that contained a sentience of its own, spreading from one victim to the next like the dreaded symbiote moved from Peter Parker to Eddie Brock (Spider-Man reference, folks). People have stayed away from it, going so far as to wear a necklace of garlic while fingering a crucifix nervously in their pocket, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice.

Oh, wait, it was released on the Wii? I guess that explains it. Everyone knows gamers are as paranoid about something different as eighty year old Republicans.

I could tell you here that Dead Space: Extraction is the sort of game any Wii owner that dares label themselves as “hardcore” (whoop, just threw up in my mouth a little) ought to own. However, that would be getting ahead of myself. For now we must acknowledge that this title is flawed, though I’m a bit confused as to whether these things are problems with the game or not.

Like everyone else I was excited about a Dead Space spin-off. It was my favorite game of 2008 because it seemed to do everything it had set out to do with competence and even excellence. Shooting at the limbs of foes offers great opportunity in enemy design as well as a new and interesting thought process to dealing with foes. The variety of unconventional weaponry only provided further flavor. Then you throw in the atmosphere and sound design, the use of kinesis and stasis, then the zero gravity and you have a recipe of a damn good time that fails to ever be boring. The only irritation was the story being a series of fetch quests and chores with little progress in the plot. At the very least the writing was decent (much better than Event Horizon, one of its more questionable inspirations), and there’s a lot of interesting back story that gives purpose to a sequel for a change instead of saying “hey, you know how we could make even more money?”

So yes, Extraction was easily a game I was excited for until they mentioned it was a rail shooter. The Wii already has enough of those. Even further is the fact that rail shooters rarely feel like an experience deserving of fifty dollars. So I went into the game very uncertain of how I’d feel about it.

Visceral Games certainly did their best to make this more than “just a rails shooter”, an act that turns into a sort of double-edged sword. There is a major focus on telling the story, experienced from the perspective of various characters. You see how the disaster began and start to uncover additional secrets that add to the potential of the setting as a whole. In fact, it would be very nice to see one of the characters reappear in Dead Space 2 due to their suggested key role in this game.

Unfortunately this also causes the player to feel cheated. You are stuck looking at where the character is without any say yourself. The only time control is yielded to the player is in short moments where they are too busy looking around for any ammunition or hidden items. There are some points where the player is able to choose between two separate paths, a choice that certainly adds some replayability to the game, but otherwise the player is given no control of the narrative or how they experience it.

While this is normally not a problem in rail shooters, as it is just part of the genre, the high priority on delivering a narrative suddenly makes this frustrating. It feels as if the player should be given more control, but for whatever reason they are stuck seeing what is determined by the game. While in rail shooters it is typical to miss quick pick-ups and items, when it happens in Extraction you feel frustrated. There are text and audio logs to find that add to the narrative, and when you miss one it feels as if you lost your chance at an essential part of the experience. By trying to be more than an arcade shooter the game drives a sort of expectation, and when that expectation is not met it becomes frustration.

Is this a fair criticism? See, that’s what I mean by being a double-edged sword. On the one hand the narrative makes the game more worth the cash and gives it a much more satisfying experience. Yet due to previous expectations of how a rails shooter should play versus how a deeper game would play goes against habits built up over years of gaming. It is certainly an adjustment to make and pays off, but there is just this nagging feeling the entire time that Extraction could have, and should have, been something more than a rails shooter.

That pretty much sums up my largest problem with the game. It feels as if it was limited to something that everyone “knows” sells well on the Wii. Instead of trying to make a spin-off that played as Resident Evil 4 plays, or something entirely different, they stuck with a shallow form of delivery. I have theories as to why they went with this, but I’ll get to that at a later date.

Suffice it to say, the very fact that Dead Space: Extraction is a story-heavy rails shooter shouldn’t be counted as that great of a fault. It also keeps the story mode from being a simple two-player style of game, as there is a greater time investment without being able to drop in and out as easily as, say, House of the Dead. Unless the two players are slowly making their way through the story together, one player will always be lost as to what is going on. That each level has long pauses so the story can progress only drives the problem further.

Again, however, this isn’t necessarily a glaring flaw either. Aside from the challenge mode which presents a more Arcade style of play, there are other benefits to the story mode allowing two-player capability. Nearly every aspect has two sides and thus makes it difficult to view as an actual problem in design or function. Some players won’t care that the story is completely on-rails with little control offered. Others will want something more. Some players won’t care if they drop into the middle of the story without a clue as to what is happening. Others will. It has to be one of the hardest titles to be objective on simply due to its format.

So let’s take a step back here. Instead of focusing on what might be problematic, let’s focus on what is. The inability to fully customize your weapon load-out has to be the biggest mistake of all. As you progress through the story mode you won’t have a choice as to which weapons you can use. What you ended the previous map with is what you start the next on. Suddenly the choice to try out a new weapon is conflicted with the fear of being stuck with a poor gun. It would be nice to say all the weapons are useful, and to some players I’m sure they are, but there are a number of weapons that are simply better to have. Yet you don’t know this at the start of the game! So you may try a variety of different guns, only to find at some point you have four weapons you don’t like or want. It would be nice if you could swap them out at the start of the next level, but the only option is to hope you find a gun you do like at some point down the line.

To give a bit of gravity as to just how bad this design choice was, there is one boss where quick firing and precise weapons are a requirement. The only weapon you are forced to keep for the entire game, the Rivet Gun (the one weapon they give you in case you run out of ammunition for the rest) is decent, but it lacks power and can be too precise. After all, no one can keep their hand completely still. If you happen to be faced against this boss with nothing but short-range weaponry or slow moving projectiles, then you may easily find yourself dying. Fortunately I didn’t die! But I almost did. I hated my equipment, chosen for the sake of trying new weaponry out, and was unable to replace them until I could find more favorable weaponry in the next set of levels. This is a situation that any player could easily find themselves running into.

If you go back to replay through a level you are given the option of equipping one of the guns you’ve collected, but that is all. You are not given the choice to fill up multiple weapon slots, but instead must leave the remaining two open for whatever tools happen to be present in that level. While I understand the desire to keep a player from being able to complete a level too easily, this only limits their ability to customize the experience as they see fit. A better option would have been to limit the player to the number of weapons they might have accrued to by that point. That way the first two or three levels they can only choose one or two, but after that they can equip any weapon they desire. It’s not like any one gun suddenly makes the entire game easier (well, that isn’t necessarily true; the flamethrower is a death machine).

As for the weapons themselves, ultimately the ones that work the best are the plasma cutter, flamethrower, line gun and pulse rifle. Sure, other weapons can get the job done, but it feels as if there is little point when you have those guns available. The plasma cutter works as a pistol with a much wider area of effect, requiring less precision while providing the same amount of power. The flamethrower is great for dealing with close ranged foes as it frequently knocks them back and kills them within a short amount of time. The line gun is perfect for hordes of foes coming your way or when you want to make short work of enemies firing projectiles from a distance. The pulse rifle is merely an excellent back up for any of these weapons when ammunition gets low.

Everything other weapon in the game merely has more drawbacks than it does benefits. The Ripper itself is a gun that could have been really awesome, but it feels a little too awkward to use at times. By pushing the Wii remote forward or backward you change how far out the spinning blade extends to, but this leads to more time getting the blade positioned just right than slicing necromorphs to pieces. With enough practice it could become a useful tool, but the flamethrower already does a perfectly fine job taking on foes at the same range.

As stated earlier, there are text and audio logs to pick up in addition to ammunition and weapon upgrades. These provide background to anyone not familiar with Dead Space as well as additional details to those that are. Unfortunately, you’ll be lucky to hear or understand the audio logs when you pick them up. If you are like me, you keep the speakers on your Wii remote off. The sound quality is terrible and more often than not becomes annoying. When No More Heroes used this speaker functionality as a simulated phone call, gamers everywhere were confused as to why some sections of the game were completely silent. Even those that did have the sound on couldn’t understand what was being said a lot of the time.

This mistake continues in Dead Space: Extraction, only at any moment you can find yourself holding off Necromorphs while the audio log continues to play. If you could go back into menus or your collected items to replay the message, it would be fine. Sort of. Playing it out of the Wii remote would still be a terrible idea. However, no such option is given. In fact, there’s no way to go back to any of the logs you’ve picked up. Such content should be available for the player to read over or listen to whenever they wish, as well as giving them a sort of context as to what they are missing. Yet the only time the logs are available are when you pick them up within the level, the one place you will be the most distracted by everything else going on.

Now, the final two flaws of the game aren’t mechanical, but they are still worth mentioning. The ending to Extraction sucks. If it were nothing more than an arcade style light-gun game, it would work. It’s short, simple and has that sort of horror film suspense end to it. In fact, if this were a much more simple game I would have liked the ending! Yet this was a plot-heavy game that left a lot of questions unanswered. There was no assurance of a sequel, no idea as to what might happen to these characters later, just a quick two or three minute clip before credits. Whether we’ll even see another entry in this series again is up in the air considering the sales numbers, which EA would like to blame on the Wii. Unfortunately, it’s all their fault.

Gamers have long since abandoned Nintendo, making excuses while ignoring perfectly fine titles in favor of the same old tripe on bigger budget systems. If you want to sell your game on the Wii, you have to try and sell it to people that aren’t your average gamer. This means no scores from gaming magazines in your commercials, and less focus on gameplay than on the story. These are non-gamers we’re talking about, after all. They’re just going to assume they suck at the game anyway (which reminds me, if you are a frequent gamer, you’ll probably want to play this on Hard). Give them a reason to want to play it.

To provide a bit of an anecdote, my sister is not really much of a gamer. She’s been going through Final Fantasy XII since the summer and was also one of her first experiences using the analog stick. She finally has stopped complaining about “what was wrong with up, down, left and right?”. She doesn’t game frequently, doesn’t know any of the jargon and probably wouldn’t step outside of childhood franchises like Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda without good reason.

So one day I’m playing Extraction on the family television when she comes home. She watches, wondering what the game is, and asks some questions as the story progresses. I do my best to explain the setting and what’s going on as I continue to blast the foes away. Once I finish the level she says “wow, I actually want to see what happens next”.

This is the target market for Wii games! Everyone assumes that the non-gamer will only be interested in Mario and puzzle games, but they’re wrong! People like a good and interesting story. If they already have a Wii and they see a game has a plot that might appeal to their tastes, then they will have a higher chance of buying it than if they see nothing but violence and gunplay during a commercial.

Dead Space: Extraction could be a great introduction into the “hardcore” style of game (ugh, there’s that vomit again). Especially considering that the game is usually pretty easy most of the time. Unfortunately, it never occurred to EA that these sorts of people wouldn’t be reading gaming magazines or websites, expecting the press to do all of their marketing for them.

This is why games fail on the Wii. It’s not because people aren’t interested, it’s that no one even knows your game exists. Which is a damn shame because this is one of those titles that should have sold as much as Metroid Prime or one of the Resident Evil games.

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