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Review: Dead Space Ignition | PSNStores

Review: Dead Space Ignition

Posted by on October 19th, 2010 | 2 Comments | Tags: ,

Publisher: EA
Developer: Visceral Games / Sumo Digital
Release Date: October 12 2010
Availability:
Demo: Yes (1617 MB)
Price: $4.99 | £3.99 | €4.99
Players: 2
Rating: Mature

What I Liked:
The Price (Free if you Pre-order Dead Space 2)
The voice acting
The fact that you can rotate the playing field with the right analogue stick (yeah, I’m clutching at straws here.)

What I Disliked:
The art
The gameplay
Everything else.

Dead Space Ignition’s main purpose was to get people excited for Dead Space 2. After playing Dead Space Ignition, I have to say that it has fulfilled its purpose in a magnificent way, as I am positively desperate to play a real Dead Space game. As a Pre-order bonus, Dead Space Ignition is fine, with an unlockable suit in Dead Space 2 being rewarded upon completion, and the game setting up the story of the sequel. However, It certainly isn’t worth any sort of currency, as the game itself is entirely without merit.

Ignition takes the form of a motion comic, with the player taking the role of a handyman, tasked with fixing various things on “The Sprawl”, a massive ship. The fixing itself takes the form of 3 different mini games, one being a game in which you guide a line through some obstacles, a game where you essentially play the enemies in a tower defence game, and finally, a couple of sequences which amount to mirror puzzles, with the player tasked with guiding some beams of light into certain spots on a board. Suffice to say, these mini games are repeated ad infinitum throughout the course of your mercifully short quest, and by the end of the game, I was certain that the game was just piling on mechanics for the sake of it.

The fact that the fastest time on the leader boards for Dead Space Ignition clocks in at less than 20 minutes should tell you all you need to know about the amount of gameplay the game actually contains. The rest of my 1 and a half hour playthrough was taken up entirely by cut scenes, and they are by far and wide the best and worst thing about Dead Space Ignition. They verge so far into the realm of bad, that they almost swing around and become fantastic. This is in a large part due to the art. Now, I don’t claim to be an artist, but Ignition contains some of the most horrifying contortions of the human face that I have laid eyes on in quite some time. You’ll see faces that look like they’ve melted in the sun, and faces that belong on the canvas of a grand master, all of them are horrifying. For a game that I can only assume sees itself as scary, Dead Space Ignition is one of the funniest games I’ve played all year.

Don’t buy Dead Space Ignition. There’s little gameplay to speak of, and the story itself is told through grotesque caricatures, masquerading as people. If you pre-order Dead Space 2, then you’ll likely get Ignition for free, and even then, I’d recommend playing it in one sitting, getting your Dead Space 2 armour and story details from it, and staying far away after that. It’s just not worth the pain.

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