Dead Space Ignition

With my newly made preorder of Dead Space 2 came this rather interesting little downloadable title. Taking place right before Dead Space 2, Ignition is for the most part a series of 3 different types of minigames with motion comics as cutscenes in-between. There are also 4 different "paths" for you to follow through the game depending on some choices you make about where to take your character.

The story follows Franco, an engineer, and your trusty cop companion Sarah across the Sprawl right before the events of Dead Space 2. As an engineer you are tasked with performing various types of hacks to repair things that have started falling apart, apparently by sabotage. Soon enough the Necros start popping up and it's up to you to hack your way through doors and other various helpful things while Sarah holds off the Necros.

It's about as boring as it sounds.

There's a kind of 2D race/obstacle game where you guide a constantly forward moving red dot past obstacles which slow you down while avoiding other dots that can knock you to the sides, impede your way, or even reverse the controls on you. You have some tools at your disposal too, including boosting along with the things the other dots do to you. Basically you run the course and hope to get to the end before the other dots.

Then there's the least difficult one, which is kind of like being at the opposite end of a tower defense game. You are given several types of viruses which you must then send out to try to destroy everything in your path and destroy this green terminal at the end. Especially later on once you've got the super virus which turns turrets against other turrets this game becomes more about just pumping out viruses and waiting until they reach the end than anything else. Technically there's a limit to the amount you can release at any one time, but they get destroyed at such a fast rate (and even if they don't your energy replenishes quite quickly) that it will never hinder you.

The one I had the most trouble with were the hardware hacks, which are essentially laser redirection puzzles. You're given a certain amount of reflectors that you have to place in a certain way so as to point the green light into the green receptacles, the red light into red, and eventually combine green and red light to make yellow go into yellow. It's more complicated than it looks, and eventually I just resorted to walkthroughs because it really wasn't worth it.

Okay, you may say, so the puzzles are real bad. Is the story at least worth the playthrough?

Nope. For one, the motion comic style might have been cool, but the animation, especially the motion part of the animation, is so poorly drawn that I often found my eyes drifting away and just listening to the dialogue because it was so bad. On top of that, the ending comes out of the blue, and while I'm sure it will set the stage for Dead Space 2, the rest of the game provides absolutely no explanation for why it happens. You spend practically the entire game running away from Necros. Depending on which path you choose there are some interesting variations on how you get to that end point, but the why of how you get there remains completely elusive. **SPOILER...KIND OF** Franco is fairly obviously a follower of the church of unitology, which looks to the Necros as what prophecy foretells as the path to immortality. So he gets these cryptic messages throughout the game from someone mysterious, which eventually set him towards the psychiatric ward of a medical building (Sarah has died along the way) where none other than Isaac Clarke resides in what appears to be a stasis pod. Franco hacks into the terminal and starts the sequence to set Isaac free, and then the game ends. Whoopdedoo. It is almost assuredly in this series of stasis pods that the Dead Space 2 demo begins. **END SPOILER**

So basically, if you preorder Dead Space 2, you might as well play this and get what little kicks you can out of it. There are some leaderboards if you care enough about these minigames to do anything about it. But under no circumstances should you pay the $5 retail price. It's worth the free pricetag, but no more. It's quite sad because this could've been an interesting way to set up Dead Space 2 and build excitement for it, like what I hear Case West did for Dead Rising 2. Instead it's a lackluster mess that barely earns its name as a prequel.

Dead Space Ignition gets a 3/10.