Games with generic titles can be a bit of a gamble, they can be very easy to overlook due to the title. It could be absolute, bargain bin, trash that was shoved out in the hopes an unsuspecting public would pick it up, but at the same time you might encounter a… Curiosity. Not a gem, or relic, something that exists beneath those platitudes, but not something that should be totally dismissed. Extermination on PS2 certainly fits into the latter, there is something quite enjoyable about this game and it also has some deliciously questionable voice acting, not quite classic Resident Evil 1 stilted, but the delivery of some moments is delightfully underwhelming. Albeit, I am talking about the North American release, which has some changes to the European release, namely the main character, Dennis, looks a little different, the script has differences, and they have different voice actors across the board.
I don’t think I would have ever encountered this game if I wasn’t going through RetroAchievements’ Survival Horror genre listing. But I am glad I did, for a game released in early 2001, one year into the PS2’s lifespan, it’s not bad. It’s not fantastic, I am not telling you to go out and play it right now. But if you have about 6 hours that you want to slowly burn through, I can think of worse things you could be playing.
So, what are we dealing with here? Extermination is a third-person survival horror game, probably with a bigger emphasis on the survival element, but even then, your main weapon can be restocked with standard bullets at certain dispensers spread out across the game, you also get a couple of modular add-ons to turn your rifle into a shotgun, flamethrower and grenade launcher, but bullet stations don’t restock that ammo. To compensate for a seemingly endless supply of bullets some enemies are quite bullet spongey. Sometimes taking an entire clip of bullets to drop, but that is because the game wants you to hit them in a specific location to do maximum damage. Most enemies have a non-discrete “shoot me here” growth which the auto-aim doesn’t target but might still hit randomly. So, besides the auto-aim, you can go into a first-person mode for those precise shots, but you will be standing still to try and make those shots and most situations don’t really give you the luxury of lining up carefully curated shots at enemies.
As for the plot, well, there are absolutely zero surprises here, it is all safely trodden ground even for the time this came out. Dennis and his team are off to an Antarctic research facility due to the government losing contact with it. On arrival, things are not good, they enter in the aftermath of a warzone. It doesn’t take long for you to find weird leechlike monsters scurrying all over the place and for your buddy to become overwhelmed by them, swiftly start mutating and instantly shot dead by a survivor at the facility. Not too long later, during one of many moments backtracking, we notice his body is no longer there, you get a gold star for foreshadowing, well done. After reuniting with the remaining squad members, the decision is to just blow the facility up, I was honestly quite surprised how quickly we went for the “Nuke it from orbit” response. Not complaining, as honestly, that should probably be the first response if things are looking bad. I wonder how much of a climate disaster that would be just blow up a research lab in the Antarctic. That feels more like a 2020s concern, not a 2001 one.
But what story about a biological agent from space running rampant around a research facility would be complete without government interference and people wanting to take to combat test the creatures before they deploy it in war zones? I mean, spoiler alert, that is probably the closest thing we have to a twist in this game, I say that, actually the fact that two, what I assume to be, IT Techs are the only survivors in the facility is probably the biggest twist. There is also a freelance reporter running around, but I only encountered him twice and it is a plot thread that, unless I missed something, is left hanging. There is also something of a romantic subplot? Hard to say, as all the characters deliver lines with absolutely zero conviction. The awkward line reads are probably the best part of the game in all honesty, really evokes original Resident Evil vibes at times, and those are best vibes.
So, as we blast our way around the facility, killing mutant dogs, bats and vaguely humanoid shapes we need to go back to talking about the leeches. They have the ability to infect your player character, and you have a handy little % indicator of how infected you are on the status menu. Now, becoming fully infected doesn’t kill you instantly, but it does cut your max HP by 40% and your health will slowly drain. But! There is a vaccine, in fact you find numerous ones, that you can use in special healing pods which removes all infection and fully heals you. You also get a small handful of instant use healing items, but typically those only restore health, not reduce your infection rate, other enemies can infect you, but the primary infection providers are the leeches. Though it does makes you wonder if there are readily available vaccines and healing pods how entire incident was an issue in the first place. Clearly an inside job, I mean it always is, right?
At the end of the day Extermination isn’t a terrible game, it doesn’t take long to get through, even casually but the biggest issue is there is a lot of back tracking, and unfortunately it doesn’t quite have a well-crafted layout, like the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil where backtracking is expedited through unlocked shortcuts, there are a couple of rooms that you will see half a dozen times by design and it, whilst some of them do change a tiny bit (repopulated by enemies, minor aesthetic changes). For one or two particular areas, once you have been through them an additional 4 times, it just feels a bit dull. Still there are far worse Antarctic based, horror third person shooters you could be playing!
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