Being a fan of the original Dead Space, of on-rails-shooters in general, and being the only genre where my girlfriend and I can play together in perfect harmony without me screaming at her for constantly making her character either look down at the floor or up at the ceiling; the chances were high that I (or we rather) would really enjoy Dead Space Extraction.

After the histrionics, chronic cussing and B-movie spoof antics of our last lightgun game, House Of The Dead: Overkill, the sinister, dark vibe of Extraction is a rather brutal shock, especially when the earliest chapters insist on allowing you to reload your Rivet Gun with all the urgency of a particularly lazy sloth. Aliens (Necromorphs to be exact) shamble at you with frightening speed, and like the original instalment in the franchise, actively encourage wanton dismemberment by blasting the legs from their malformed bodies.

There is a lot of character-building and story-setting in the opening stages of the game, particularly for a light gun game, and it’s seriousness is hampered by some ropey voice acting and game-slowing text logs. When it forgoes the sense of narrative, Extraction starts to deliver some great action, enlivened with new ideas such as the ’soldering’ mini-games, statis, and the Glow Worm – a chargeable light stick powered up by a shake of the Wii-mote.

We are too early into the story mode to deliver any definitive assessment of the game’s merits, but early indications show that if it starts prioritising action over laboured story-telling scenes, Extraction could be the most harmonious game experience my girlfriend and I enjoy together before we go back to playing our own games