Dead Space Extraction Review

Few Wii games are this impressive to look at

More so than any other on-rails shooter I've played, Extraction gets under your skin. I'm used to having to blast away a room full of incoming zombies, but the Necromorphs come at you in an unnerving way, shuffling from side to side, and it's easy to lose your cool. Blast a few shots into thin air and miss your timed reload and all of a sudden one of the abominations is laying into you with some kind of giant mutated crab-like claw.

EA has packed in loads of extra content too, including a challenge mode and some great video comic books, complete with voice acting. These are unlocked as you work through the campaign and are well worth taking a look at - offering the kind of added value that pointless character drawings and concept art can only dream of.

I've already touched on the presentation, but it's worth repeating just how great Dead Space: Extraction looks and sounds. The on-rails nature of the gameplay has no doubt allowed developer Eurocom (probably most well known for 2002's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) to get more out of the Wii hardware than if it had needed to create a fully interactive 3D world, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this is one of the most detailed, atmospheric games on the console. The audio is superb, too, scaring you even if there's nothing to be scared of, and creeping you out at every opportunity. Some of the voice acting comes across as a tad wooden, but for the most part it's easily on a par with the best heard in top class next-gen releases.

Dead Space: Extraction had me a little worried. I wanted to believe the experience would translate well to an on-rails shooter, but wasn't all that confident. I was concerned that the spectacular visuals, undoubtedly a key feature of the next-gen game, would suffer terribly on the Wii, and that we'd get another half-arsed game that clung onto motion controls as if that alone were all that's needed. I needn't have been so pessimistic, though, as Extraction stands shoulder to shoulder with SEGA's Overkill as a great example of the modern on-rails shooter, showing just what the Wii's capable of when developers put their minds to it.