Just plain fun

User Rating: 8 | Dead Space Ignition X360
Dead Space Ignition is an action puzzle game developed by Visceral Games and Sumo Digital and published by Electronic Arts for the Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network. Dead Space Ignition plays out as a "choose your own adventure" motion comic. The story's set on the Sprawl, the space station Dead Space 2 takes place on just before the Necromorphs hit the fan and all hell breaks loose. You'll see the story from the perspective of Franco the engineer and his gun-toting girlfriend, but anytime you step in and play it'll be via Franco's engineering skills. See, gameplay in Dead Space Ignition boils down to three different mini-games. One has you placing mirrors on a circuit board to bounce colored lasers to the appropriate targets, another charges you with racing your line of energy to the goal before your opponent can, and the third is a tower defense game where you're actually the one attacking. All of these have the end result of opening a door or fixing an electronic. Trouble is, none of the mini-games are all that fun. The tower defense game boiled down to me just spamming attackers to overrun a security grid, the line one was a mix of a cakewalk and frustration as my controls could be flipped by the opponent, and the light reflecting game was just boring. I'm a Dead Space fan and wanted to know how this story was going to play out and what exactly happened on the Sprawl, but when I'd put down the controller to do something else, I found myself never wanting to pick it back up. Making matters worse is that this game, a game that's so story driven, so focused on cut scene is ugly. Dead Space Ignition takes poorly done drawings and then manipulates them for motion. Sometimes this is just bobbing them up and down to simulate walking, but other times, it's pulling up eyebrows or jury-rigging arms. The animation looks cheap, and that's putting aside the fact that the still art is rocking the "everyone's face has melted" motif. Hands are simple triangles, heads are blobs, and proportions definitely seem off, but of course I still had fun in this game and the achievements are barely easy to achieve.