Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Solid"

Due to my financial constraints, I was unable to play the original Dead Space when it first came out in the Fall of 2008. Some of us can recall the economy taking a hit that year so I had to be thriftier than usual. And just when I was about to buy the game, my laptop died. So I was thrilled when the Wii put out a prequel to the series the following year.

At first I was nervous about playing a rail shooter style, since I'm so used to exploring the environment first hand in the first person shooter genre. But it turned out to be a lot of fun and takes a lot of pressure off from finding things to that regard. Instead, you just have to pay attention visually so you can get weapons, pickups, and power ups through a kinesis method. There are four different levels of difficulty, and once you get the hang of the controls, you can enjoy playing on the most difficult level.

I played the the game with the Wii remote and nunchuk and found it to be very useful and the shooting engagements with the Necromorphs are great. Necromorphs are the mutated humans from the result of extracting the Red Marker on planet Aegis VII. You have to make sure to dismember your enemies because headshots aren't going to do the trick in Extraction. You have a variety of weapons to choose from to accomplish this. I'm a big fan of the flame thrower, line gun, and the plasma cutter. The force gun, pistol, and pulse rifle also are very useful. The weapons have a secondary fire option if you twist the remote in a certain way. You also have the ability to Stasis the Necromorphs to put them in slow motion and making them easier to kill or to give you some time to either reload or handle a different enemy.

The Story Mode is a lot of fun but it can be tedious when you already know what happens if you decide to play a different difficulty level. However it's useful because you'll want to use your kinesis to power up your weapons. The Bonus Materials provide a lot of replay value as you have to fend off 10 waves of Necromorphs and try to score as many points as possible. The game is a bit on the short side, but if you can pick up this game for $20, it's a great bargain!