I was surprised I came to care at all about the characters in a game of this sort. The characters you run around with are unique and well-animated enough that I managed to identify with them and care to some degree about their eventual fates.

Also, the voice acting is flatly passable, for the most part, but there is some campy, B-movie-sounding bad delivery that actually works in the game's favor. The story is pretty thin-it's mostly a bare, on-the-run survival tale-but there are a couple of small, interesting elements that seem like they may tie into the inevitable Dead Space sequel. You're not any one character throughout the game instead you swap between several perspectives among a group of survivors, revealing different areas of the ship and the different motivations of each person unlucky enough to be caught up in this awful mess. You'll revisit a lot of familiar locations on Aegis VII and the USG Ishimura as you retrace the original excavation of the insidious artifact known as 'the marker,' and then battle the awful creatures that overrun the colony and ship in its wake. You will certainly get the most mileage out of Extraction if you played through the first Dead Space, which the new game serves as a prequel to.

But keeping the genre's inherent restrictions in mind-not to mention the limitations of the Wii hardware-Extraction is really pretty good, for what it is. These days, that's not a style of game serious game players usually gravitate toward.

Extraction's marketing campaign would like you to think of it as a 'guided experience' that whisks you through the dramatic beginnings of the series' horrible space-monster outbreak, but in blunt terms, Extraction is an on-rails shooter. I almost feel like I need to offer apologies or excuses while recommending Dead Space Extraction, EA's Wii follow-up to last year's breakout original sci-fi horror shooter.

Dead space extraction review