Jurassic Park III: Island Attack

"A top contender for the worst game of all time."

By now almost everyone has heard of Jurassic Park. The movie trilogy was quite popular when it was released. Games that are based on movies have always been known for its bad quality. Well I will say right off the bat that this game is an utter disgrace to video games in general. This is quite possibly the worst game that I have ever played. This game was included along with my Gameboy Advance SP when I bought it on Ebay. While a free game is always nice, I would of rather not have this one, as it tarnishes my game collection. Anyways lets get on with this review and how many problems it has.

The best part of the game is its graphics and that is nothing to brag about. The game sports some of the dullest backgrounds on the GBA. The animation looks horrible and the character models look like they were from the Nes days. The graphics just felt unpolished. It felt like the developers completely slacked off. What really irked me was the lack of coloured palettes. The game's backgrounds were dull and seemingly dead. Please throw some colour in there jeez…it was like watching black and white movie, but much…much worse.

In terms of gameplay there are so many things wrong. The game sports horrible A.I, stiff controls, horrible aiming, and lacks any fun in general. Most of the times the dinosaurs really seem to lack any intelligence. They would make themselves easy to kill. If you have watched any of the films then you know they are not suppose to be easy to kill. You also start off with a horrible gun, so the game is very unbalanced in terms of difficulty. The aiming is way off, as I found myself missing a bunch of times. The controls did not help one bit either. The control scheme is lacking and for the most part, I found it hard to position my character into a place that I wanted it to. Jurassic Park III: Island Attack is nothing short of a broken mess.

The music was horrendous. As I was playing, I did not once feel the tunes of the music. I was very much distracted by the horrible gameplay and spent most of my time fighting the controls rather then worry about the musical soundtrack, but even then the music simply didn't match the mood. The music should have been more tensed and should have enhanced the feeling of the game, but it failed to do that.

I never bothered to finish this game because it got very repetitive. However from the few people that have played the game, the game is supposedly very short. I really can't see anyone playing this for more then an hour or two. The game is quite frankly no fun at all. There are so many things wrong with it mechanically, that it would be simpler, if you just play something else.

The game in a sense does feel like Jurassic Park. Your trying to avoid these dinosaurs and get off this island, so it does portray the theme fairly well. But with everything else that fails miserably I simply cannot pad the score in this section just to pad the score for the game.

This review is not one of my better written reviews and that is because this game is so bad the review really portrays it. Playing this game sent a shiver down my spine. There is no other word to describe it other then the fact that it is horrible. Avoid this game at all cost.

Pros
+ The Jurassic Park theme

Cons
- Horrible A.I
- Stiff controls
- A lackluster story
- Extremely repetitive
- Unbalanced A.I
- Aiming is way off
- Quite possibly the worst game I have ever played

Graphics - 3/10
Gameplay - 1/10
Sound - 2/10
Value - 2/10
Presentation - 2/10
Overall - 2/10

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 02/14/05, Updated 03/28/05