October is the perfect month for this game to be played!
A couple podcasts ago, I mentioned trying out Dead Space Extraction on the Wii all for about 10 minutes. Now we know it’s a prequel, but since I never had the time to play through the original game that came out a year ago, I figured October is as good of a month as any to have the bejeezus scared out of me. This game delivers, released for the Xbox 360, PS3, and the PC….Raw scale says, 9/10.
The Good – A well told story in the sci-fi/horror realm. You play as an engineer(Issac) that’s part of a team called in to see what happened on this huge mining ship that’s found an alien artifact known as the marker. This huge rock has telepathic tendencies, making people hallucinate and feel to the point of having a group make a religion worshiping the thing. When you get to the mining ship, pretty much no one is alive and it’s very obvious by the blood and gore left behind that it wasn’t a regular party that went down. It’s a survival horror game that gets both terms right. What’s here is 3rd person shooting action with extremely tight controls, awesome graphics(lighting especially), and endless jump scares that keep you on edge cuz you never know when an enemy is gonna pop out. The enemies(Necromorphs) themselves are interesting in that they are a product of a disease from the marker(as well as small creatures), basically everyone started killing each other then morphing into freaks of nature that reanimates left over dead bodies into more necromorphs.
There’s a refreshing take on how you kill them, you can’t just fill them with as much ammo as possible or just go for the head shot(they’ll keep reviving or just coming at you), the trick is dismembering their limbs, this kills them and makes sure they don’t come back, and of course the only way you’re gonna survive. You get a couple cool abilities to aid you in battle, stasis which makes thing slo-mo(great for when enemies are running at you), and kinesis which lets you pull in objects then shoot them if you please. As usual with games like these that are good, there’s a useful upgrade system in place, you’ll definitely wanna search out the joint making sure you have all the ammo you can find, and money too so you can upgrade your weapons to keep up with the rising threat. The heads up display is really cool and unique, acting as a hologram in front of your character. The audio especially deserves mention, not only does the music keep things tense, but the sound effects as well as environmental sounds are incredibly produced, and on a good surround system, wow, the sound design rivals big hollywood movies. The campaign is full and definitely not short.
The Bad – Something you won’t hear me complain about too much, but it’s a little too long.The game took me just over 12hrs. to complete, but I think it could’ve been shaved down to maybe 8 or 9hrs. Sometimes your objectives can be a little repetitive, plus I’m the guy that likes to explore in these sorts of games, so I’m making the game long enough myself, but if you don’t explore you miss out on all the goodies. Why buy ammo when there’s plenty strewn about?
The Ugly – Seriously, the amount of times this game made me jump and bug out. Play with the lights off and the surround turned up, this game will turn you into a punk 
