Dino Crisis

"Resident Evil with big lizards"

Dino Crisis is and Action\Adventure, (or Survival Horror is you wish), developed by Capcom. A nasty habit of game developers is to take one successful formula, add completely nothing in it and just change the wrapping to make it look good. So what do we have here? Quite simply take resident evil and replace the zombies with something equally cool… ninja's? Naaahhh… Nazis?? Bah, not again! Boobs??? Errr… maybeeeeee… Dinosaurs?????? Yeah, that's the one!!!

Story: 3.6/10
Presentation: 4/10

If you are an experienced gamer and not a 10 year old kiddo who just bought his first Playstation console and game then you'll probably be able to guess the plot of the game without even opening up the manual. You, the heroine and your team, an elite group of soldiers, are sent in an island where secret experiments are being conducted. Your mission: the capture of the head scientist-honcho of the whole place. Finally we have dinosaurs! Where do these lovely creatures fit in? Well you'll have to play the game to figure this out, don't cha??? Well don't expect anything else than the usual Capcom cheesiness. Below average characters, non-existing plot twists, no mystery at all and finally no suspense. This game just isn't scary… and yes I know that Resident Evil games aren't actually scary, but this is not scary AT ALL!!!

Graphics: 7/10
Design: 6.2/10

The main difference between Resident Evil and this game is the fact that instead of stationary pre-rendered 2D scenes Dino Crisis is fully 3D. If you ask me, I've never had any problem with the 2D backgrounds and secondly I'm not the kind of person that gets excited when seeing the word “3D”. Silent Hill was good at that, instead of just being a 3D game, it added extra atmosphere with special effects like real time lighting, great mist and other weather effects, etc. Dino Crisis on the other doesn't have something special, in fact Resident Evil games look much better. First of all, all the areas look the same. A typical Hi-Tech\Industrial Compound world, full of metal and very similar and boring colors. The Dinosaurs have very good design, (especially the big one!), but there are only a few of them and don't have great differences between them.

Sound: 6/10
Music: 5/10

What this game greatly needs is atmosphere. The music is the typical, low-tempo-when-nothing-happens and the supposed-to-be-scary kind of music when an enemy suddenly jumps on you. No ambience effects, no screams, roars of something else that adds something to the overall feeling… pity! On the other hand all the other sound effects like the sounds of weaponry and enemies are ok, not something special, just ok. Finally if you thought that Dino Crisis has equally bad voice acting with Resident Evil you are wrong, here things are worse, why? Well Resident Evil's voice acting was so bad that it was actually good since it added some kind of a B-Movie feel to it. Here the voice acting is very… average, not good, not bad, not nothing, just boring.

Gameplay: 6.5/10
Replay Value: 4.2/10

Basically Dino Crisis is your run-of-the-mill Survival Horror game. You go from room to room in order to find keys, ammo and health items and clues for the various puzzles. The best part of the game though is when you meat a Velociraptor, (the Jurassic Park movie ones, not the real smaller sized ones). If you choose to fight him you'll have no fun at all and that because Dinosaurs while significantly more fast than your average zombie don't actually pack much of a threat. The fun comes from trying to avoid them actually. Most corridors in the game have buttons that activate lazer beams that act as barriers between you and the dinosaurs. Also when entering a room and the Dinosaurs in the room next to yours has no barrier holding him back, will enter in your room giving the game a great feeling of actually being chased by an intelligent creature.

Another thing that I've liked is the ability to mix various items with special enhancing tools. For example you can improve your health packs or create a couple of anesthetic ammunition from them, create better ammo and many more. Also in order to use the storage tool, (where you storage items you can't carry), you'll have to find some sort of colored plugs that you must use in them, something that in my opinion didn't really added something to the overall fun in the game.

Besides all these we have a fully 3D game similar with Silent Hill, has anything changed??? Nope! Apart from the fact that Regina, your character can do a full 180 degrees turn, what else??? Nothing really since the controls are exactly the same with any other Resident Evil\Survival Horror game. The game apart from the various, (and very small), doses of fighting with lizards, gives you some puzzles to waste your time with… how much time you ask? About 1 minute each… laaaaaaame!!! So is this game worthy of your time? Well for one and only time yes. After that you can play again to see the alternative endings or get more costumes for Regina but I guarantee that it won't be any fun at all.

Positives:
-Enemies that follow you in other rooms
-The ability to mix various items in order to create stronger\different ones
-Good enemy design
-3D Graphics, (Geeeeee…)

Negatives:
-Needs more action
-Extremely easy puzzles
-Boring plot, no atmosphere, no scaring moments
-Small replay value

Also Play:
-Resident Evil (Series)

Overall: 5.3/10

If the developers had worked more in the few new innovations of the game like the chase between Dinosaurs and the item mixing then it would have been a much better game, but it ended up being just an average Resident Evil with big lizards.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/09

Game Release: Dino Crisis (EU, 1999)