Dead Space Ignition Review

Ignition is a puzzle game based in the Dead Space universe and it’s very puzzling why it exists at all, after all how often do think of badly animated comic book style puzzle games when you think of Survival Horror? Dead Space was a game that took me a long while to get into, but once I actually sat down and played it I enjoyed it very much – on reflection I’d much rather be reviewing that right now.

Dead Space Ignition
Developer: Visceral Games
Price: Free
Platform: Xbox 360 (reviewed) and PlayStation 3

Ignition revolves around the use of three different mini-games and a pick your own adventure style storyline. The mini-games are Hardware Crack (connect the lasers, the biggest pain), Trace Route (basically an advanced form of Snake) and System Override (the logical opposite of a tower defense game). During the first play through of the story some of these may be quite tricky, but if you go for all the endings and play through multiple times they become much easier due to the accumulation of equipment and upgrades. The Hardware Crack game is a simple connect the lasers, this starts off easy with you only having to connect green to green and red to red but later on the combination of red and green to make yellow increases the difficulty and annoyance levels. The Trace Route is almost a combination of Blur and Snake, it’s a race to the end with other balls of light trying to stop you or beat you there. The System Override is less of a game and more of continuous mash of the A button (or equivalent) until you clear a path to the end.

During the mini-games you will occasionly hear one of a few one liners that the computer has to say, these are truly horrible attempts at humour that play on much funnier things; with lines involving cake (Portal) and the line “I’m afraid I can’t do that” (2001: A Space Oddesy). That’s not the worst thing about the mini-games however, the worst thing is that if it goes wrong (a Hardware Crack for example) and you know there’s nothing you can change to fix it; you simply have to wait for the timer to expire because there’s no reset command. This means that there’s a lot of sitting around doing nothing if you’re not very good with puzzles.

The story has four separate endings, these could be classed as two ‘good’ and two ‘bad’ endings because of how the women dies. I’m sorry but if you seriously didn’t  see that coming then you must be new to concept of video game story writing. This coincides with awful voice acting which reaches levels of monotonal-ness that I thought impossible, the ‘animation’ on screen rarely reflects the mood of the characters – for example there are several moments when it shows that one of the characters is clearly very upset or angry but the voice work portrays absolutely no emotion at all. Talking of the animation, these is horrible as well. The comic book style that they went with for Ignition is possibly one of the the worst design decisions that I’ve ever come across.

Good points about the game then, that’s right there actually are some. The main positive point, and only reason anyone downloaded the game, is that you unlock equipment for Dead Space 2 which is a good thing but if this was done in a better game then it would have been better. The only other good thing I can think of is that it’s free, at least they haven’t just stuck a few mini-games together and charged £40 for the privilege which is more than I can say for the majority of the Wii library.

The Final Word
To sum up then, Dead Space Ignition is probably the least enjoyable 2 hours of the gaming life and the only reason that anyone should purchase it is if they want the extra equipment for Dead Space 2 which probably won’t be any good anyway (the equipment, not Dead Space 2; that should be good). However if you are desperate to waste your life away then get on Xbox Live or PSN and get it.

– MonsterVine Rating: 1 out of 5 – Abysmal