Review: Dead Space Extraction HD

  • Developer: Visceral 
  • Publisher: EA
  • Platforms: PS3
  • Genre: Survival Horror/On-Rails Shooter
  • Multiplayer: Single Screen Co-Op

Dead Space extraction first came out for the Wii in 2009 and was greatly overlooked and only sold 9,200 copies in its first week, it was praised by all the major review magazines and internet sites but the public failed to recognize it as quite possibly the best looking game on Nintendo’s little white box, The team at Visceral had made an impressive dead space experience within the Wii’s Limited Capabilities, But now we have the HD, Up scaled version to dissect, Dismember and burn on the PS3. 

I was very interested how the sound and visuals would compare to the original and i was not disappointed at all, the sound has been uncompressed to its full potentials which makes the already believable voice acting sound clean and crisp, The visuals are the same story as the sound, upscaled and increased polygon count making the game world even more believable. One thing of note is the animation of all the characters in the game, the body movement and facial expressions are some of the best iv seen and makes each character real and believable but this not the same for the franchises enemies. Most all animate the same and behave with the same characteristics, with only a few enemy types it gets dull fighting each battle rather quickly.  


Its not very often you find a Wii title being ported to the bigger machines but when you do, you can expect some very odd results like “No More Heroes” For example, A fantastic Wii game but on a bigger system it fails to bring over the fun controls and does a terrible job of upscaling, But this time Extraction has done everything possible to improve on what was already a great looking game.

You have alot of options with what method of control to use but it is obviously best played with the move as with most on-rails shooters you need the speed and accuracy to play the game as the developers intended. The one thing i am disappointed about with the controls is the mapping of certain buttons on the move, with the face buttons spread out around the main move button ‘~’ i found it difficult to reach my thumb up over the controller to initiate a reload with the [] button or change weapon, because as i did i was finding i was pointing away from where i was aiming which can be hugely annoying in frantic situations where the screen is literally filed with necromophs of all shapes and sizes. 

As for the games set up its much like the other dead space games with long moments of atmospheric scenes building up tension to short panic filled shoot outs where waves of different types of enemies rush at you giving you a limited amount of time to think strategically about tackling each one which is a huge part about all the dead space franchise. Prioritizing and ammo management are you main concerns when finding yourself in these situations, with crazy weapons thrown in the mix along with solving puzzles simultaneously makes it very satisfying and breathless when you manage to just scrape by with little health and ammo.

I can honestly say iv never played a game like this before (apart from the wii version), it does everything right for a dead space game and everything better for a shooter that uses all the elements to create a real world with terrifying results.

You can either buy this from the PSN (£9.99) or get it with Dead Space 2 which has dropped in price to about £23.99

  • + Impressive Port
  • + Great Edition to the franchise
  • + Believable Characters and Interesting Plot Lines
  • - Controls mapping a bit of an issue
  • - Few Enemy Types
  • - Long sections without save points

By Ty