The Haunted Hoard: Dead Space: Ignition (Xbox 360)
After the first Dead Space game wowed players with its atmospheric horror enhanced by a sci-fi outer space setting, it was no surprise people were eager to play the follow-up, Dead Space 2. Dead Space 2 would end up being one of the most expensive video games to develop of all time, and it’s likely Electronic Arts wanted to ensure this game recouped some of that outrageous budget by keeping people excited for the upcoming title. A few months before the release of Dead Space 2, a pre-order bonus would hit digital marketplaces first, a small game taking place in the Dead Space universe and serving as a prequel to upcoming game’s events. This game was Dead Space: Ignition, and it went on to be utterly reviled by the gaming press.
Some of the hate it received was no doubt in part because of its departure from what made the first Dead Space interesting, Dead Space: Ignition is primarily a puzzle game that just so happens to have a horror story in between moments of that kind of play. That doesn’t mean some of the distaste was unwarranted though, and one of the issues is with the game’s story. Players play as an engineer named Franco who works on the space station near Saturn known as The Sprawl. This massive facility both serves as a living space for an entire colony of people and as part of the planet mining business that has pushed mankind into exploring further into space, but while doing his daily work fixing technical systems, strange undead aliens known as Necromorphs begin to attack The Sprawl. Fortunately for Franco, his girlfriend Sarah is skilled enough with weapons to fight them off as Franco travels through the space colony, the two trying to escape while helping people they come across along the way.
The problem with the plot isn’t heavily related to the gameplay substance save for the playable character’s role. I don’t often find myself agreeing with other people when they say a side character in a video game sounds like they’re having a more exciting adventure than you, but in Dead Space: Ignition, Sarah is shooting down hordes of zombie-like aliens while the plot contrives some reason for you to pop open a control panel and play hacking minigames. Malfunctioning consoles and locked doors are your enemies while she’s fighting off the interesting creatures players wouldn’t be able to fight until Dead Space 2’s release, but a horror framework for a puzzle game is admittedly an interesting concept. What is a little less interesting are how Dead Space: Ignition handles chances to influence the story by selecting from two different options. Your adventure across The Sprawl can sometimes take you to situations where you need to decide how to proceed, such as taking a shortcut outside of the airlocks or playing it safe inside the space station. However, while these will determine which puzzles you need to complete and how certain events unfold, the main plot hits the same beats one way or another and the ending is always the same. Replaying to see the alternate routes ends up rather pointless because of this design decision, but a worse decision was trying to use comic book art for telling the story. Everything is voiced, but the visuals for scenes in the game are blown up comic panel art, and its very clear some of it wasn’t meant to be seen on a large T.V. screen. Images with minimal detail fill the screen, but even ones that were meant to be viewed at such a high resolution will have plenty of ugly faces or weird stretching and squashing animation applied to it to try and make the art feel more alive. The game’s prequel nature means many would only be playing Dead Space: Ignition for the plot elements, and these end up being conveyed poorly in a few too many ways.
The three minigame styles in the game vary in quality, but they aren’t quite the abysmal experiences such widespread distaste for the game might imply. Beginning with the best one on offer, Hardware Crack is a pretty solid puzzle design, the player presented with a grid of objects and asked to connect lasers from their projectors to color coded destinations. The player needs to rework the grid with their available tools so that a laser will reach its intended destinations. Mirrors will reflect the beams at 90 degree angles, laser splitters will send the beam in multiple different directions, and by sending the beam near certain objects, you can cause them to detonate to clear away junk blocking your laser’s path. A whole game could likely be built around this concept even though Dead Space: Ignition never gets incredibly complicated with its designs, but figuring out how to get beams around the obstructions and to their destinations requires thoughtful resource management. There is a timer, but none of the minigames feature a timer that really feels like its applying any degree of pressure due to how long it gives you. Similarly, the player levels up gradually and gains more uses of certain items in other minigames, these making things easier universally despite the lack of difficulty being the main problem with all three modes on offer.
The other two minigames in Dead Space: Ignition are considerably weaker, and neither had to be. The first hacking game you encounter is Trace Route, which is not so much a puzzle as an action game. Your red dot will move through a long path to a goal, the player needing to avoid any walls blocking the route there, hazards that could slow them down or reverse their controls, and the aggression of other dots aiming to hit you into hazards. Even if you make contact with something you’ll be able to continue easily enough, a speed penalty being the biggest punishment, and there are boosters and abilities you can activate to make up for lost time. However, the timer here is less your speed getting to the end and more the other dots you’re racing against… except these enemy dots sometimes won’t even try to finish the whole race and are replaced later by dots which aren’t even triggered until you arrive to their portion. Even if you’re doing poorly these dots are still pretty inept, meaning that there is barely any pressure to try and perform any degree higher than adequately.
System Override had potential as well but also lacks the proper degree of resistance. In System Override, you essentially play a reverse tower defense game, the player sending in different viruses to break past a system’s protections. This is all visualized by a hexagonal grid populated with programs that will either slow your viruses down, damage them, or alert others to their presence to allow for them to be attacked by all nearby programs. You pack a few different viruses to take these down, some slowing down enemy programs, others dealing damage to them, some able to turn enemy defenses into traitors, and some fragile ones meant to sneak by and damage the main part of the program you’re hacking for massive damage. They drift out into the grid as soon as you deploy them and you can tell them to move up or down, but choosing one direction and just sending them off works well enough. The time pressure is minimal, and you can keep sending out more viruses with impunity, the only delay to it being a resource meter that refills automatically. So long as you mix up your unit type often enough you will eventually win. It’s almost too mindless of an activity to be bothered by, but as one of the three cornerstones of the gameplay, it definitely doesn’t help that it’s so easy to succeed without even trying.
All of the three modes can be played in mutiplayer, and while their fundamental issues aren’t solved by making it competitive, two of them are definitely superior than their solo counterparts. System Override becomes a proper tower defense game where players alternate taking turns, one player placing some defenses and then the other sends out a limited amount of attempts to break through. Trace Route instead becomes a proper race where both players are dots and if one falls too far behind they lose, but Hardware Crack’s play is strange in that there is a puzzle grid presented and you take turns placing objects to guide the laser beams around, each person trying to stop connections the other player wants to make while also needing to make some of their own. None of these are a huge step up from their single player counterparts and likely won’t keep two players interested for long, but System Override and Trace Route would probably be better with these elements integrated in the main story’s versions of the puzzles rather than remaining in their current forms.
THE VERDICT: Dead Space: Ignition is a poor attempt to give players a taste of what awaits them in Dead Space 2. The story is told through ugly art, the alternate paths for it amount to little, and it feels like the gameplay is awkwardly forced into it almost every time it crops up. The minigames you need to play aren’t too compelling either, and while Hardware Crack requires a bit of thought, the other two gameplay styles can be finished without much effort. Their designs fail more in applying pressure or asking for interesting tactics rather than being outright bad, the multiplayer versions showing they had potential, but nothing really helps to make Dead Space: Ignition anything more than a failed teaser of what was coming in a far superior game.
And so, I give Dead Space: Ignition for Xbox 360…
A BAD rating. I can’t really justify going any lower because Dead Space: Ignition, for all its faults, doesn’t really do enough to earn a worse rating. The game is short and barely puts up any resistance to completion so even the minigames can’t offend too much since they’re easily pushed past. The story isn’t awful even though its splitting paths and visuals don’t help it, and it threatens to have interesting moments involving the necromorphs and The Sprawl’s people before you come to a locked door and Franco brings the action to a halt to play with computers. I’d almost suggest this might have been a testing ground for the typical style of hacking minigames you find in many action games as a brief change of pace, but these are all a bit too involved to fit that billing and thus are probably just minigame ideas that weren’t fleshed out enough for the weight they’d be carrying. Not much really works in this short Dead Space side story, but nothing lingers for long enough or fails in such a way that it can really leave an impression.
Publications that put more weight on things like the value of a product or the runtime of a game certainly weren’t wrong to be more harsh with Dead Space: Ignition than this review, but the content of this title just doesn’t have enough substance to warrant a more negative reaction. It’s a bad attempt to give you a brief look at an upcoming game and it chose some poor ways to add gameplay to this prequel’s weak plot, so while it is certainly bad, this short game could have definitely been much worse. It isn’t substantial enough to blemish the Dead Space series, it’s just a forgettable curiosity that will mostly be remembered as a footnote in any coverage of the lead up to Dead Space 2’s release.