Dead Space Ignition Member Review for the PS3

The Good: Unlockable armor for Dead Space 2, tries to do something different

The Bad: Terrible story, bad voice acting, bad art, mini-games have no strategy and are poorly designed, not fun at all

For a game that carries the Dead Space name you would expect it to be good. Ignition is nothing of the sort because it's a series of hacking mini-games that follows an engineer and a cop on The Sprawl who have to do hacking things during the Necromorph outbreak...yeah real exciting. The voice acting is terrible and the game play is even worth with a lame story.

The game is comprised of three games and the first is a side scrolling defender type game, but not nearly as fun. You just control a red orb that moves through space while dodges obstacles and racing AI orbs. You have a few powers such as speed boosts, walls you can drop to slow them down, and circuits that make them spin out of control. This is as uninteresting as it sounds because no matter what you do they seem to always get ahead of you, and this game was obviously not play tested because the obstables are almost unavoidable and are in such positions that you have to slow down every time while the AI just quickly manuevers through it.

The second game is some weird reverse tower defense game where you have to get viruses to a gate on the other side, but have to destroy seekers and radars on the way. You get four different types of viruses that do various things, but you just spit them out and they go wherever they want. You can't control them so there's no strategy except spitting them out in certain orders.

The third game is a mirror and laser mini-game, but they are laid out in such incomprehensible designs that you don't really get a grasp on where to start. Getting different colored lasers to different end points should be simple, but lasers flip and move on their own to confuse you, and this doesn't make the game fun at all. You can drop lasers that split the beams, and of course this is timed, but there is not strategic way of going about any of these games so it all feels like a big mess.

You won't even finish the game because they are so frustrating that you will just give up. No matter how skilled you are the game works around you and doesn't allow you to increase your skill due to poor level design. On top of all this the game is made up of badly drawn concept art turned into some hack of a Dead Space story that you will quickly forget. The easy achievements and the armor you get at the end for Dead Space 2 aren't worth a trek through this terrible hack job.

(Based on Xbox 360 version)