Dead Space: Extraction

There's a reason not many games are ported from Xbox / PS3 to the Wii, the power of everyone's favourite white box simply isn't up to handling the graphics of many PS2 games, never mind those of the newest console generation.

So it was with some trepidation that we approached Dead Space: Extraction, not so much a straight port of the 2008 Xbox critical hit, but a prequel that converts the gory 3rd person shooter into an old-fashioned on-rails shooting gallery akin to House of the Dead.

But, it's not quite as simple as that. Rather than gliding round apparently on wheels shooting bad guys in a memory challenge, your character's first-person perspective darts about in shock, as zombie-alien type things attack from all sides. Yes, this naturally makes it much harder to aim, but the whole experience is so much more noticeably immersive, and Christ it's terrifying.

The game reuses much of the gimmickry from the original game, including several maps. Players kill ‘necromorphs' by de-amputating them (yes, it is a Pythonesque as it sounds), freezing monsters using ‘stasis', leaping through zero gravity and a blatant rip-off of the Half-Life 2 Gravity Gun known as ‘kinesis.' It's all good, needlessly gory fun, and in a nice little touch, a second player can join in on the action at any point.

The acting and dialogue isn't even quite as laughably bad as most first person shooters either. The game is based around a cult graphic novel (watchable as an added extra) set on a deep-space colony and orbiting ship, when as often happens in these situations, an alien parasite of some kind turns the humans into hideous spindly things with knives for hands. In case you hadn't already guessed, your job is basically to survive, taking as many limbs with you along the way.

That said the developers have still neatly managed to weave all sorts of background storyline into the game through the usual captain's diaries and logs you always find in heating ducts. Yes, we've seen this all before as a cost-effective way of padding out a story without bombarding the player with cut scenes, but cleverly in Dead Space: Extraction, the audio logs play through the Wii remote speakers. It's a nice touch that transforms your Wii remote into a crackly radio to accompany your passage down darkened corridors.

There are some basic puzzles, although these are almost too easy to actually be called puzzles, plus tons of hidden items only the keenest eyes will spot. The story mode is even accompanied by a ‘Challenge' mode, which plays through stages in a lively arcade against-the clock shooter. Unlike some other Wii first-person shooters too, the controls are not so ludicrously sensitive that you end up strapping a wrist to a chair arm to keep the aim steady.

The developers' Visceral Games (part of EA), seem to have tried extra hard to compensate for the limitations of both the shooting gallery genre, and the Wii itself. It's quite inventive in places, and the graphics still tower above that of most other games on the console, yet the restrictions of the genre's control mechanism and graphical gulf between the Wii and nu-Gen console versions leave a bad taste at times. For all the control trickery, to the passer-by, it still looks like a PS2 game.

Still, this is a great game to share with a mate, or alone in a darkened room on a console that typically lacks such blokey, violent wares. If you like your horror movies coming alive - or should that be back from the dead - this is definitely worth a punt.