Review #289: Extermination

 You got it!

 Extermination was a Survival Horror game released veeeery early during the Playstation 2's lifetime, and it shows. It's also a game that's known for having had Swery 65 as part of the developement team, which is the reason I wanted to play it. That and the fact that you can get it on the cheap.

 The game takes a ton of inspiration from Carpenter's 'The Thing', featuring a parasitic lifeform that can take human hosts and mutate their bodies into gruesome shapes, as well as taking part on snowy zones. You play as Dennis Riley, part of a marine team tasked with exterminating this lifeform, however, things go awry and the plane carrying his team crashes. Separated from the others, now Riley has to rendezvous with the survivors and kill this... thing. The story is a bit hard to take seriously, since the translation is a bit wonky and the voicework is an absolute trainwreck, but it's a cheesy, enjoyable trainwreck. You've also got to take in mind that this was a very early PS2 game, which means that graphically it's aged pretty badly, even the animations are very lackluster. Bonus Trivia: The PAL version of the game features a completely different model for Dennis, as well as a different dub and a different Credits theme song, their loss, as the American credits song is an incredibly cheesy way to end a cheesy game, which is just perfect.

 Something I really liked is that the entire game takes place on this single facility. As you go through the game you'll obtain keycards and other thingies to permit access to different, previously inaccessible zones. Which does mean that there's a bit of backtracking. One thing I liked, is that there's unlimited ammunition, kinda. Spread throughout the facility are a few dispensers that will fully reload your automatic rifle, as many times as you want, and only your automatic rifle. Shotgun, Flamethrower, Grenades and Missiles come in limited supplies though. Speaking of guns, the game features a 'fully customizable rifle', which the game's really proud of as they tout it as a selling point at the back of the game's case, but it's nothing fancy, instead of guns, you equip parts in order to use the rifle as a shotgun, a flamethrower, etc. You can do it on the fly as well, so it's nothing revolutionary or what not.

 Healing supplies also come in limited supplies. Dennis not only has to look out for his health, but for the Infection level. The Infection level usually increases from getting spat at by the enemies, this spit doesn't do damage unless you are completely infected. Getting completely infected will ruin your day; your max health drops to 60, and constantly depletes, and now both water AND enemy spit becomes dangerous. And sure, you can use medikits to heal back(Up to 60 out of 100), but there's only one way to cure the infection: MTS machines. MTS machines are very rare(I think there are about 5 in the entire game) and in order to use them you need the rare MTS Vaccines. Basically, keep out of the green spit's way. I think I found about 15 vaccines, maybe a bit less, and I always had about 5 spares, until I assumed, correctly, that I was near the end of the game and stopped using them so sparingly. There's another very rare type of healing item(That comes in A and B variety) that heals both HP and Infection level(But WON'T cure an infection, only decrease the infection level if not infected), but these are even rarer than the vaccines, and you'll probably want to save'em up for the multi-form last boss, trust me.

 For a Survival Horror hero, Dennis sure is nimble. He can actually jump and climb over certain obstacles, but it's a bit wonky. Y'see, the X button is a context-sensitive button that lets you: Climb over ledges, jump over gaps and roll around enemies. It works about as well as you'd expect, which is very poorly. How many times did I jump to my death wanting to grab a ledge? Or even trying to roll around an enemy, but being near a bottomless pit, Dennis thought that I actually wanted to jump towards my doom, silly Dennis. There's an area near the end of the game where you must jump over hanging boxes, and it was an absolute nightmare getting Dennis to jump where I wanted him to. The camera is also fairly terrible, sometimes it lets you put it behind Dennis' back by tapping L1, but you need to be holding still. Eventually I found out that tapping R1, entering Aiming mode was much better, and it'd also warn me if there was any nearby enemy. Speaking of R1, it autoaims over nearby enemies, but seeing how, unless you want to waste ammo, you should shoot over the glowing green spots, it's fairly useless, which made me default into the R2, first person aiming, to deal with the bigger enemies. All in all, the controls are going to be one of your biggest enemies in this game.

 Extermination was a game I found had some neat ideas, but does little to stand out from the crowd. It's not very scary, and the controls can be a pain in the back sometimes. That said, I found it to be an entertaining, but flawed game, and not very memorable at that.
 6.5 out of 10