Dead Space: Extraction
t EA’s booth, after a round of Tiger Woods Golf (protip: it is difficult. Tiger makes sad faces when you suck. Which you do), I turned around to find an empty Dead Space: Extraction demo running, so I snuck in and tried it out. I haven’t played the original, a kind of Metroid meets Resident Evil type game, but I’d heard great things. This Wii prequel is, as you may know, a rail shooter, but with a little more control than the standard entry into the genre. Hit/punch the jump for more. Abuse that fucking jump.
So, the demo was incredibly long, and showed off, I think, the beginning of the game. You are in a spaceship, and it is approaching another..spaceship. And the bigger one is shooting at you. And you have to shoot the shots as they come towards you. It is fun, but a little obnoxious insofar as the ship is spinning all over the place and it’s not the easiest to actually hit those shots. Or I suck? Probably both!
After you land on the ship, you kind of amble out with the rest of your crew, and here’s where it becomes a lot more rail-shooter-like. When you enter a room, you have the option to look around with the nunchuck stick, picking up items around the room with A, which shoots out a kind of miracle white orb tendril. Pick up items! Pick them up and they are yours to keep and you will have them forever. Then, after a little time for looking around, you drag yourself around the rooms, shooting undead, creepy spikehands who scream and hate you. There were a few guns I had – the plasma cutter, a gun that shoot metal blades, a kind of generic pulse rifle, and a flamethrower. Each was fun, although the metal blades one was particularly fun for the nasties. There was a moment where I entered an elevator and had to wii remote solder a connection while badguys attacked – when they got close I could use the C button to slow them down with…magic? I assume?
Waggling the nunchuck was a melee attack (which was pretty nice in tight situations), and waggling the remote caused a “glow worm” to light up – over the course of the level it got darker and darker and you waggled to get a little light. So, as with all wii games, there are times when you just kind of shake your hands like little pom poms. And kill zombies!
The end of the demo featured your character getting killed, so spoiler alert? Welcome to Dead Space: Bitches. It was fun, and more action based than horror-ey. It looked like a rail shooter metroid. I don’t really know why they couldn’t just give you free reign, but I am not EA. Not by a long shot. Pick it up if you can’t get enough rail shooters.