We touch down on the USG Ishimura for a look at the prequel to Dead Space.

Dead Space Extraction has a lot to live up to and a lot of preconceived notions to overcome, not just as a prequel to GameSpot’s Best of 2008 award winner for Best Atmosphere and Best Sound Design, but also as an on-rails shooter. In terms of the former, Visceral Games (formerly EA Redwood Shores) has gone to great lengths to ensure that Dead Space Extraction is one of the more visually intricate games on the Wii, coming as close as possible to the level of detail present in its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 predecessor. “There’s a lot of new content–new weapons, new environments, new enemies, and new bosses,” says Wright Bagwell, lead designer on the game. “But of course, we wanted to reuse some stuff. You’re going to be in some of the same locations, so we took some of the Dead Space assets–environments and characters–and brought them over to the Wii. I think we got them to look really close.” And as with the game’s predecessor, sound is an equally important facet of the Extraction experience. “A lot of the time, sound is the last thing that gets polished,” he adds. “We’re trying really hard to make sure Extraction hits the bar that the original Dead Space hit.”

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Dead Space Extraction is a fresh take on last year’s premier sci-fi survival horror offering, as we found out in EA’s first demo.

Even though Dead Space didn’t do as well as publisher EA might have hoped, the amount of investment in comics, DVDs and merchandise meant that it was always planned as an ongoing series. In fact, so assured of the nascent franchise’s potential was developer EA Redwood Shores, that it started work on a Wii game halfway through development of the original. We got to speak to the team that broke off to work on Nintendo’s console, and hear how they’re turning the survival horror hit into an on-rails shooter.

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