Ridiculously short, repetitive, lazy and boring. Ignition has very little going for it and is a huge disappointment.
Pros:
+Clean presentation
+Some extras for Dead Space 2
Cons:
-A glorified collection of minigames, of which there are only three
-Sloppy animation
-Dull story for the most part
-Incredibly short
-Formulaic minigames
-Uneven difficulty (the hard up above can also go down to easy)
Review:
It didn't take long for the prestigious Dead Space series to become a full-fledged franchise, boasting animated films, comics, action figures and a bevy of games for various systems. Dead Space Ignition is one of the most recent of those products, and had the potential to be a great way to get some Dead Space on until the release of the definitive sequel, DS2. However, it fails to do so on pretty much every single level. It's basically a minigame collection, except there are only three of them and they're all dreadfully plain and uninspired. That's everything you'll get in this two hour adventure which traditionally costs 10 bucks. Now that's just an insult to humanity.
You play as the engineer Franco Delile, who after a routine elevator fix discovers that something fishy is afoot aboard his ship. He and his partner Sarah soon find the deadly Necromorphs, blood-thirsty and deadly alien lifeforms that take over the bodies of humans. Now they must hack (computers) and slash (security systems) to escape with their life.
The story, though interesting in relation to the happenings of Dead Space 2, is nothing more than a dull choose-your-path adventure split completely in two: cutscenes and minigames. The cutscenes are animated in a quirky, rather muddy manner. It's not badly done, but it doesn't really give the game any edge or charm. What happens in them is usually not all that exciting, usually just Franco and Sarah going from one point to another and sometimes running into trouble. You can occasionally choose between two options in the adventure to get other results, but the game isn't good enough to warrant multiple playthroughs anyhow.
The main reason for that is the latter half of the game: the minigames. It's been mentioned before, but there are only three different minigames available. The first one's goal is to race a cursor you control through an obstacle course against other cursors. It's a functional minigame, but is almost broken by the rubber-band AI and often unavoidable obstacles. The second is a bizarre tower-defense game, except you play the attacker. You send along a few viruses which travel along the walls and do distinct tasks according to what kind of virus it is. The game boils down to how fast you can distribute various viruses, and there's literally no strategy involved. In the third and final one, you have to guide various beams of light into their respective receptors. This is the least broken of the three, though it's still not that entertaining. If there's anything positive that can be said about the minigames, it's that the presentation is sometimes cool. Little comfort in that, though.
This is pretty much everything you'll find in Extraction. The three minigames are used over and over, albeit not twice in a row. There's a rotation between cutscene and minigame, cutscene and minigame for the entire two hours you'll be playing Ignition, and there's little reason at all to play the game again. You do get some extra items for Dead Space 2 (a suit and some extra items) for completing the game, but it's not worth paying ten dollars for, especially when the package is so laughably sparse. Hopefully, EA will put future small projects in the franchise in more capable hands. For now, Ignition stands as the series' low-point, and is a genuinely disappointing experience.
Story: 4.9/10.0
Gameplay: 3.7/10.0
Graphics: 6.6/10.0
Replayability: 2.7/10.0
Final score: 3.5/10.0