Jurassic Park: The Lost World

"Its a movie licence on the Saturn, what do you think?"

If one thing can be agreed upon about The Lost World, it didn't exactly surpass Jurassic Park. True, it had a lot to look up too but the movie itself was average at best. Movie licences have had a chequered history in video game history - for every Blade Runner there is a Street Fighter: The Movie, Crow: The City of angels etc etc. The Saturn is home to a number of these hopeless titles, so I was already in a fairly cynical mood when I decided to get The Lost World.

The Lost World is a platform game that essentially plays like some of the old Mega Drive games like James Pond, with sprites running along a 2D background jumping and battling enemies and so forth. This style of game is really nothing new and doesn't really offer anything that different to what the Saturn already has in its Platform lineup, especially the 3D games such as Croc and Sonic R.

At least there is a little bit of variety in the game as you get to play as 5 characters, Human Hunter, Human Prey, Velociraptor, Compy (The cute little dinosaurs which pecked Peter Stormare to death in the film) and The T-Rex himself. The most fun you will have in this game is when you play as the T-Rex, but even this moment is spoiled because it is a fleeting appearence over a few levels and it is very linear and repetetive. This is really the same for the other characters, with the human prey episodes playing like a glorified Pacman, and a lot of the missions are actually very dull and lifeless. Its also unacceptable that the game suffers a massive amount of slowness and framerate issues when a number of dinos or humans are on screen at the same time. It just doesn't feel like a game that is in use on 32 bit technology.

Despite the game adopting a 2D Mega Drive platform style, the graphics are not a real problem. The dinos are well animated and move convincingly and the backgrounds look bright and detailed if a little samey. Plot wise, this game represents the movie in almost no way. Yeah, they bought the licence and didn't even use it to base it on the game. Its almost as if they thought title would be enough to sell it...Sega wouldn't do that, would they?

All in all, this is not a tough game to complete. Many of the levels are remarkably easy for the average gamer to complete and once it is over, there is really not much to come back for. If you've made it that far, that is. In fact, the only reason people will become stuck is because some of the stages have been designed so badly, or the fixed camera angle at a certain point has made it too frustrating to know how to progress.

Its not so much that this is an awful game; Its not unplayable. Its just that there are far better games out there on the Saturn. Repetetive gameplay, samey stages and backgrounds and the lack of real challenge make this a very below average effort of a saturn platformer.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/06