Virus of the Mind

Author's Rating:

Pros: This is a scary game with better voice acting than most of what's out there.

Cons: Hard-core players won't find it that challenging. Repetitive, though difficulty levels can be adjusted.

The Bottom Line: 
For those who like scary space stories, this one is decent.

Author's Review
Okay, let's be up front about this:

1. I suck at video games. I have no coordination, and can't kill things really fast, and usually crumble over overload attacks and just melee the hell out of everything (on the wii, this means shaking and pressing the remote and the nunchuck like a spaztoid) hoping I survive to get more life.

2. I usually die several times at each level, and I keep on going until I figure it out and scrape by.

3. I cheat mercilessly, always looking online for cheats and walkthroughs whenever anything gets hard.

4. So far on this game (which saves itself, a nice feature, if you make it far enough, and "unlocks" the next chapter once you've earned it), I've had about 50% accuracy on shots fired, killed 90% of the enemies, and found 75% of the bonuses and clues.

That said, my favorite sort of game has a long, involving story, frequent saves, not-too-endless Boss Battles, and a lot of creepy FX. A horror RPG that is more sci-fi than demonic is something I search for, sort of hard to find for the shiny-happy Wii, but, then, a Wii-person is what I am.

I've enjoyed several versions of Zelda, but I guess my favorite game was Resident Evil 4, which had a lot of creepy set-pieces, really stupid zombies, a variety of weaponry, and a pretty upstanding hero (and also a girl to save who wasn't a complete idiot and sometimes became the featured player herself).

I've looked for other comparable horror/fantasy games, and  I found a game called Obscure: The Aftermath, but it was misogynist and stupid, with vapid characters I could not get into, grating voice-acting and annoying puzzle-locks on every level.

So I was really looking forward to Dead Space Extraction, only wary that it was a railshooter (which would seem to limit story potential). In fact, once you get the hang of the first-person point of view, there's a lot of story, most of it easy to see, and occasional branching paths that give you minimal control over plot.

It is all about shooting monsters, it's true. But they're hard to shoot and adaptable, and there's a lot of story embedded around them. In Dead Space, you're on a world in a mining colony that has uncovered an ancient artifact, the Marker. This artifact emits some kind of mesmerizing mind control (called a virus all-too-frequently), which gives people hallucinations, makes them violently paranoid, and eventually transforms them into creatures.

So we end up following a group of semi-sane and functional survivors around a swiftly-crumbling high-tech installation, witnessing mass murders and suicides, welding things open or shut and using the kinds of tools and weapons miners would have in order to try and find a working ship to get off planet.

There are spectacular space-ship crashes, a variety of zombies to attack, and reasonably well-developed characters (some with colorful European accents) to interact with. There are occasional zero gravity sequences that really do give a sense of floating and flying. The battles are predictable, but the weapons change, and earning life and clues and extra abilities is something you do with telekinesis, which is either something all humans have or a function of the life-pack equipment everyone in Dead Space wears as a matter of course.

There are also many truly disturbing scenes of carnage, either under way or littering the blood-stained settings with bodies.

You can constantly grab at stuff with the a-button, while shooting at stuff with the B, and shaking the nunchuck when a mellee strike is called for.

There's also a religious cult subplot about "Unitologists" who seem to have their own ideas about "The Marker." The religious subplot is somewhat hackneyed, but it drives some mysteries involving major non-player characters, and adds layers of significance to some of the quite reasonable dialogue. Who is to be trusted? Who has a hidden agenda? Who will give into infection next? The image of the fantastic world is no better realized than the nebulous corporate politics in "Avatar," but then again that's pretty good for a video game.

The graphics are generally bug-free, and quite effective for the Wii. Even better are the sound effects, which are piped into the Wii-mote as much as into your TV. I'm about halfway through, I'm on my third point-of-view character, and I'm still interested in the battles and the upcoming challenges. That's a win for me!

My set didn't come with the gun described in the title of this entry. Instead I purchased a handgun shooter seperately. It's sort of fun to have that ammo-feeling, but it actually doesn't work well with some of the more complicated controls (like pressing the a-button or turning the wii-mote on its side to weld). So the game is just as much fun with only the wii-mote and the nunchuck.