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"The Jet Gamer" Game Review: Extermination
9 years ago
Back to PS2 games for a little bit. Cheap ones as well.
Extermination
I got these a little while back, and I am finally making my way through a few cheap PS2 games I picked up when I was out and about. Extermination is a game I’ve seen or heard about for many years, and now I have finally had a chance to pick it up for cheap and get a chance to play it. I’ve heard it is supposed to be an okay Survival Horror game for PS2, and I do enjoy survival horror when it is done right. Well, let us take a closer look at Extermination and see if it lives up to other survival horror games out there and if it is worth adding to your PS2 collection shall we?
Gameplay
Extermination is your typical survival horror where you are the lone soldier having to fight off a large group of enemies and it is your goal to get out alive. That’s normal right? Honestly, it does a good job of playing out the role of a survival horror game with its own twists. So often for survival horror games, you usually expect to be constantly be low on ammo and that you are more supposed to dodge the enemies instead of taking them out all the time. Extermination is slightly different here in that you can actually do either or of these options. You can in many areas actually still dodge many of the enemies and either not get hit or not get hit very much. Yet, there is also unlimited ammo for your main weapon, so you actually have plenty of ammo to kill everything you would want to kill if you want to play the game that way. Even though it is unlimited, you still have to make it between ammo stations that will refill your ammo. To have more ammo, you have to find ammo clips that are scattered around the complex. Each clip gives you thirty more bullets, so the more you find, the more ammo you can carry until you need to refill your main ammo. There are alternate types of ammo as well, though these are limited. There is a reason for that, and here is one of the main reasons for that. You don’t have a large number of weapons like you do in many survival horror games. Instead, you have one gun, but you find all sorts of attachments for it to make it fire different types of ammo. For example, there is a shotgun attachment, a grenade attachment, and even a flamethrower attachment. Figuring out what weapons work best for what situation is a challenge sometimes, but even then, many of the enemies, when you have the right position can still be taken out with the base weapon with no problem. While some enemies are a lot harder to take down, most of the time, just having the right position is all you need. The reason is that some of the attachments make it easier to hit enemies in their weak points. Many of the enemies have glowing yellow spots on them that if you hit, will do a lot more damage. One attachment does allow you to go into first person mode, which you will use often as it does allow you to perch up in safe areas and pretty much snipe many of the enemies with the base weapon until they are dead. So this is definitely a different way of doing survival horror. Having plenty of ammo, but also having one weapon you mod into the other weapons is something unique I’ve never seen before. Having the option to be trigger happy or to be very conservative does give the player more of a choice on how they want to play. Though do be sure you aren’t too reckless as well. There are actually two health meters in this game. There is the standard health meter where if you reach zero you die. There is also an infection meter that is going up instead of down when you take certain types of hits. When it reaches one hundred percent, you become infected. When infected, your max health is now only sixty percent and your health will slowly begin to count down towards zero. There are special places in save rooms where you can undo this status, but other than that, if you become infected, you either need to make a dash for a save room to heal, if you have the healing item that goes with this infection, or you are going to die from infection. There is no other way to cure this infection, so if you aren’t fast, being infected, while not instant death, if you don’t have fast feet or lots of healing items, it can kill you just the same. Enemies in this game can range from the easily dodgeable, to very annoying or hard to kill. The small enemies can be a bit tricky to hit, though they are much easier to dodge. Some of the bigger enemies can either be simple enough with some distance, or super annoying if you run into the enemies that can shoot back at you. These enemies just sometimes seem to take way too much punishment before they go down, and often this means a lot of health lost as well. Just be ready for whatever enemy you come across and make sure you can either put some good distance between you and the enemy or you find a good perch to snipe them. This does mean at times you have to stop a lot to just pick off enemies from a distance, which does slow down the action. It is the safe route, but unless you are willing to run past many enemies or take bigger risks, perching yourself and sniping enemies will make it much easier to survive in the long run as well. Puzzles are almost nonexistent here. There might have been a few fetch quests here and there for certain items, but honestly, it just felt like most of the time you were going from point A to B, or you were trying to figure out where to go next, as the game didn’t always give you a waypoint or make it obvious what you needed to do nest. This game isn’t perfect in gameplay, but I will say it is unique in its own way, and people that want to try something a bit different with survival horror while still getting that old survival horror feeling that isn’t all fun and gun action, they will want to give this a try for sure.
Story
The story is both unique in its own way, because I’ve never heard of something like this before. Yet, at the same time, there is a bit of a big downfall here as well, that I will talk about both here and in the sound section of this review. The story is unique in that you are a marine, named Dennis, that has crash landed in the Antarctic at a military base with your team, but you have all been spread around the base. You are there to investigate what is going on and to get rid of the facility if it is deemed to not be salvageable. The enemies you are running across are actually all a bacteria that is taking over the people of the base, and the water itself as well. Yes, unlike in many games where you are fighting demons or a killer virus, this time you are up against a killer bacteria that wants to take over everything around it. That’s actually quite unique and something Extermination can say it came up with I feel for the survival horror series. Yet, as I mentioned there is one downfall that pulls this story down to just a bit above average instead of being better than it turns out to be. The main downfall in the story is actually the characters themselves. There is nothing wrong with them in general, as they are your generic soldiers and scientists and such like that in a monster like situation. However, the actors most of the time just feel like they are reading a script at times with very little emotion at times, and often times the characters almost feel like they are uninterested in what is happening around them. You can just tell easily that the people playing these characters either don’t care or don’t know how to act in a way that makes the characters convincing. You want them to just give a bit more emotion about the situation to act like they actually care. The story behind everything is just fine, they just needed better voice actors to tell it and to give more emotion is all.
Graphics
For an early PS2 game the game doesn’t look that bad. It is supposed to be sort of dark and dreary at times. It accomplishes that and actually as you play the game you actually get to slowly see the deterioration of the complex as the bacteria is slowly beginning to take over more and more in certain areas. Yet, honestly, many of the areas are just sort of plain and really not very exciting. The characters look find, and the enemies look okay for what they are supposed to be. Really, much of the graphics here aren’t bad, but you just don’t really see that much exciting to talk about either. I did like seeing some areas slowly get worst as the game went on, but this was only in a few areas. That would have been so much better if that happened in many more areas, but it was just so minimal and something I wish I could have seen happen in more areas. The areas that are late game areas do look way more infected than others, but still, I want to see older areas getting worst and worst as well if you are going to do that in a few areas to sort of show me it can be done. So really, the graphics are fine at the very least.
Sound
The music in the game does a good job of setting the atmosphere and several areas actually do have that slight tense feeling you want from the music. You want the music being a bit minimalistic to emphasize that alone feeling you are getting in places like this, but you also want the music that is there to either have this creepy or slightly scary feeling to them as well. When this is done well, you can really set the atmosphere quite well. While the sounds and music are actually not that bad, as I mentioned above the voice acting is just something that is not impressive at all. I almost hate to hit the rest of the game for the voice acting, but when the characters just sound so uninterested in some situations and don’t even act surprised or upset during certain events, you just wish they would have hired better actors or tried different takes when recording their voice. When someone dies, I don’t want a very blah performance. Actually act upset, or pissed when something happens you don’t like. Don’t act like you are just reading your like and just going oh no, something happened instead of acting like the thing you are reacting to actually is about to affect your life very personally or is worrying you. Really, the voice acting just isn’t good at all, and not even in the funny way that Resident Evil did it. While RE’s original acting wasn’t that great, it still can give you a chuckle. This is just bad acting.
Control
The controls are fine here. You use sort of the traditional way of shooting guns, where one button raises the button and another button fires while that other button is held. Getting around is okay as your character is actually responsive to where you want him to go. The only times your character won’t go where you want him to go is when invisible barriers get in the way. Really, the only thing that I think bumps down the controls is that times being on the edges of ledges and cliffs can be very finicky. Unlike some survival horror games, your character can actually jump in this game. Yet, your character can normally only jump when he is near edges as there are many places where you need to run and at the edge of walkways, you need to hit the jump button to get your character to jump the cliff to get to the other side. However, going down is very finicky. More than once, I wanted the character to just edge down a cliff, only to have him go jumping way off into the distance where he either got hurt or died instantly. Yeah, when you want someone to just climb down from a box, you don’t want him jumping way off in the distance when you didn’t want him to do that. Other than that, the controls are fine and responsive, with the aiming being just fine.
Replay Value
The replay value here is okay, but only just that, okay. The reason for this is that the game is pretty straight forward. Unlike Resident Evil, and Silent Hill, that I feel have a lot more variation to how you can play them while still having that straight forward feeling to them, I feel Extermination is super straight forward at times. There is very little item management, and ammo is not exactly something you have to worry about either, with your main gun having unlimited ammo from the ammo boxes. I don’t know what it is. Extermination just doesn’t seem like it has as lasting of an appeal that the other two series I just mentioned have to it. Some of that is that the other games as well have a good story to go with them, and the survival aspect is more important in those games as well. Extermination’s story is just average really as I mentioned above, some of this being due to the actors, but really, it has no other games to connect with it as well. While the game has its unique points, I just wish there was more to the game, and more of a reason for me to want to play the game again. I can see some people wanting to play this game again, but also there just doesn’t seem to be that much motivation to do so. There is nothing extra you unlock in the end other than extra ammo on an additional playthrough. There are no extras, no extra modes, or really any reason to get better at the game or to see what different strategies you can use on your next play through. Replay value to me here is just average at best. If you get in that survival horror mood, this game can full fill that mood, but there are definitely better options out there.
Overall, Extermination is an average survival horror game that survival horror games will want to pick up and play, but if you are a diehard resident evil or silent hill fan, you won’t be pulled away from your favorite series to become a fan of this series at all. While Extermination has its unique points in that it has a unique concept, and has interesting new ways of looking at a survival horror in that you can go nuts with the bullets or be conservative like in old horror games. Yet, the bad voice acting, the average story and average replay value just brings this game back down to the realm of average game. There is very little about this game that is just horrible, other than the bad voice acting at times, but there is nothing that just jumps out to make this be the next big survival horror game on the block. It is good for a first playthrough, but this looks like one of those games that you enjoy once, and then shelf until you really get into that survival horror mood once again. It’s average. It isn’t bad, it is just average, but it still has its enjoyable moments. If you like survival horror games, go pick this up as it is cheap. If you aren’t into the whole survival horror shooting games, I would say maybe let this one pass, unless you see it for cheap, while you are doing some game browsing.
Overall, in my opinion at least, I give Extermination a six point five out of ten.
Gameplay: 7
Story: 7
Graphics: 7
Sound: 5
Control: 8
Replay Value: 6
Overall: 6.5
Extermination
I got these a little while back, and I am finally making my way through a few cheap PS2 games I picked up when I was out and about. Extermination is a game I’ve seen or heard about for many years, and now I have finally had a chance to pick it up for cheap and get a chance to play it. I’ve heard it is supposed to be an okay Survival Horror game for PS2, and I do enjoy survival horror when it is done right. Well, let us take a closer look at Extermination and see if it lives up to other survival horror games out there and if it is worth adding to your PS2 collection shall we?
Gameplay
Extermination is your typical survival horror where you are the lone soldier having to fight off a large group of enemies and it is your goal to get out alive. That’s normal right? Honestly, it does a good job of playing out the role of a survival horror game with its own twists. So often for survival horror games, you usually expect to be constantly be low on ammo and that you are more supposed to dodge the enemies instead of taking them out all the time. Extermination is slightly different here in that you can actually do either or of these options. You can in many areas actually still dodge many of the enemies and either not get hit or not get hit very much. Yet, there is also unlimited ammo for your main weapon, so you actually have plenty of ammo to kill everything you would want to kill if you want to play the game that way. Even though it is unlimited, you still have to make it between ammo stations that will refill your ammo. To have more ammo, you have to find ammo clips that are scattered around the complex. Each clip gives you thirty more bullets, so the more you find, the more ammo you can carry until you need to refill your main ammo. There are alternate types of ammo as well, though these are limited. There is a reason for that, and here is one of the main reasons for that. You don’t have a large number of weapons like you do in many survival horror games. Instead, you have one gun, but you find all sorts of attachments for it to make it fire different types of ammo. For example, there is a shotgun attachment, a grenade attachment, and even a flamethrower attachment. Figuring out what weapons work best for what situation is a challenge sometimes, but even then, many of the enemies, when you have the right position can still be taken out with the base weapon with no problem. While some enemies are a lot harder to take down, most of the time, just having the right position is all you need. The reason is that some of the attachments make it easier to hit enemies in their weak points. Many of the enemies have glowing yellow spots on them that if you hit, will do a lot more damage. One attachment does allow you to go into first person mode, which you will use often as it does allow you to perch up in safe areas and pretty much snipe many of the enemies with the base weapon until they are dead. So this is definitely a different way of doing survival horror. Having plenty of ammo, but also having one weapon you mod into the other weapons is something unique I’ve never seen before. Having the option to be trigger happy or to be very conservative does give the player more of a choice on how they want to play. Though do be sure you aren’t too reckless as well. There are actually two health meters in this game. There is the standard health meter where if you reach zero you die. There is also an infection meter that is going up instead of down when you take certain types of hits. When it reaches one hundred percent, you become infected. When infected, your max health is now only sixty percent and your health will slowly begin to count down towards zero. There are special places in save rooms where you can undo this status, but other than that, if you become infected, you either need to make a dash for a save room to heal, if you have the healing item that goes with this infection, or you are going to die from infection. There is no other way to cure this infection, so if you aren’t fast, being infected, while not instant death, if you don’t have fast feet or lots of healing items, it can kill you just the same. Enemies in this game can range from the easily dodgeable, to very annoying or hard to kill. The small enemies can be a bit tricky to hit, though they are much easier to dodge. Some of the bigger enemies can either be simple enough with some distance, or super annoying if you run into the enemies that can shoot back at you. These enemies just sometimes seem to take way too much punishment before they go down, and often this means a lot of health lost as well. Just be ready for whatever enemy you come across and make sure you can either put some good distance between you and the enemy or you find a good perch to snipe them. This does mean at times you have to stop a lot to just pick off enemies from a distance, which does slow down the action. It is the safe route, but unless you are willing to run past many enemies or take bigger risks, perching yourself and sniping enemies will make it much easier to survive in the long run as well. Puzzles are almost nonexistent here. There might have been a few fetch quests here and there for certain items, but honestly, it just felt like most of the time you were going from point A to B, or you were trying to figure out where to go next, as the game didn’t always give you a waypoint or make it obvious what you needed to do nest. This game isn’t perfect in gameplay, but I will say it is unique in its own way, and people that want to try something a bit different with survival horror while still getting that old survival horror feeling that isn’t all fun and gun action, they will want to give this a try for sure.
Story
The story is both unique in its own way, because I’ve never heard of something like this before. Yet, at the same time, there is a bit of a big downfall here as well, that I will talk about both here and in the sound section of this review. The story is unique in that you are a marine, named Dennis, that has crash landed in the Antarctic at a military base with your team, but you have all been spread around the base. You are there to investigate what is going on and to get rid of the facility if it is deemed to not be salvageable. The enemies you are running across are actually all a bacteria that is taking over the people of the base, and the water itself as well. Yes, unlike in many games where you are fighting demons or a killer virus, this time you are up against a killer bacteria that wants to take over everything around it. That’s actually quite unique and something Extermination can say it came up with I feel for the survival horror series. Yet, as I mentioned there is one downfall that pulls this story down to just a bit above average instead of being better than it turns out to be. The main downfall in the story is actually the characters themselves. There is nothing wrong with them in general, as they are your generic soldiers and scientists and such like that in a monster like situation. However, the actors most of the time just feel like they are reading a script at times with very little emotion at times, and often times the characters almost feel like they are uninterested in what is happening around them. You can just tell easily that the people playing these characters either don’t care or don’t know how to act in a way that makes the characters convincing. You want them to just give a bit more emotion about the situation to act like they actually care. The story behind everything is just fine, they just needed better voice actors to tell it and to give more emotion is all.
Graphics
For an early PS2 game the game doesn’t look that bad. It is supposed to be sort of dark and dreary at times. It accomplishes that and actually as you play the game you actually get to slowly see the deterioration of the complex as the bacteria is slowly beginning to take over more and more in certain areas. Yet, honestly, many of the areas are just sort of plain and really not very exciting. The characters look find, and the enemies look okay for what they are supposed to be. Really, much of the graphics here aren’t bad, but you just don’t really see that much exciting to talk about either. I did like seeing some areas slowly get worst as the game went on, but this was only in a few areas. That would have been so much better if that happened in many more areas, but it was just so minimal and something I wish I could have seen happen in more areas. The areas that are late game areas do look way more infected than others, but still, I want to see older areas getting worst and worst as well if you are going to do that in a few areas to sort of show me it can be done. So really, the graphics are fine at the very least.
Sound
The music in the game does a good job of setting the atmosphere and several areas actually do have that slight tense feeling you want from the music. You want the music being a bit minimalistic to emphasize that alone feeling you are getting in places like this, but you also want the music that is there to either have this creepy or slightly scary feeling to them as well. When this is done well, you can really set the atmosphere quite well. While the sounds and music are actually not that bad, as I mentioned above the voice acting is just something that is not impressive at all. I almost hate to hit the rest of the game for the voice acting, but when the characters just sound so uninterested in some situations and don’t even act surprised or upset during certain events, you just wish they would have hired better actors or tried different takes when recording their voice. When someone dies, I don’t want a very blah performance. Actually act upset, or pissed when something happens you don’t like. Don’t act like you are just reading your like and just going oh no, something happened instead of acting like the thing you are reacting to actually is about to affect your life very personally or is worrying you. Really, the voice acting just isn’t good at all, and not even in the funny way that Resident Evil did it. While RE’s original acting wasn’t that great, it still can give you a chuckle. This is just bad acting.
Control
The controls are fine here. You use sort of the traditional way of shooting guns, where one button raises the button and another button fires while that other button is held. Getting around is okay as your character is actually responsive to where you want him to go. The only times your character won’t go where you want him to go is when invisible barriers get in the way. Really, the only thing that I think bumps down the controls is that times being on the edges of ledges and cliffs can be very finicky. Unlike some survival horror games, your character can actually jump in this game. Yet, your character can normally only jump when he is near edges as there are many places where you need to run and at the edge of walkways, you need to hit the jump button to get your character to jump the cliff to get to the other side. However, going down is very finicky. More than once, I wanted the character to just edge down a cliff, only to have him go jumping way off into the distance where he either got hurt or died instantly. Yeah, when you want someone to just climb down from a box, you don’t want him jumping way off in the distance when you didn’t want him to do that. Other than that, the controls are fine and responsive, with the aiming being just fine.
Replay Value
The replay value here is okay, but only just that, okay. The reason for this is that the game is pretty straight forward. Unlike Resident Evil, and Silent Hill, that I feel have a lot more variation to how you can play them while still having that straight forward feeling to them, I feel Extermination is super straight forward at times. There is very little item management, and ammo is not exactly something you have to worry about either, with your main gun having unlimited ammo from the ammo boxes. I don’t know what it is. Extermination just doesn’t seem like it has as lasting of an appeal that the other two series I just mentioned have to it. Some of that is that the other games as well have a good story to go with them, and the survival aspect is more important in those games as well. Extermination’s story is just average really as I mentioned above, some of this being due to the actors, but really, it has no other games to connect with it as well. While the game has its unique points, I just wish there was more to the game, and more of a reason for me to want to play the game again. I can see some people wanting to play this game again, but also there just doesn’t seem to be that much motivation to do so. There is nothing extra you unlock in the end other than extra ammo on an additional playthrough. There are no extras, no extra modes, or really any reason to get better at the game or to see what different strategies you can use on your next play through. Replay value to me here is just average at best. If you get in that survival horror mood, this game can full fill that mood, but there are definitely better options out there.
Overall, Extermination is an average survival horror game that survival horror games will want to pick up and play, but if you are a diehard resident evil or silent hill fan, you won’t be pulled away from your favorite series to become a fan of this series at all. While Extermination has its unique points in that it has a unique concept, and has interesting new ways of looking at a survival horror in that you can go nuts with the bullets or be conservative like in old horror games. Yet, the bad voice acting, the average story and average replay value just brings this game back down to the realm of average game. There is very little about this game that is just horrible, other than the bad voice acting at times, but there is nothing that just jumps out to make this be the next big survival horror game on the block. It is good for a first playthrough, but this looks like one of those games that you enjoy once, and then shelf until you really get into that survival horror mood once again. It’s average. It isn’t bad, it is just average, but it still has its enjoyable moments. If you like survival horror games, go pick this up as it is cheap. If you aren’t into the whole survival horror shooting games, I would say maybe let this one pass, unless you see it for cheap, while you are doing some game browsing.
Overall, in my opinion at least, I give Extermination a six point five out of ten.
Gameplay: 7
Story: 7
Graphics: 7
Sound: 5
Control: 8
Replay Value: 6
Overall: 6.5
