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By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold Rating: Average Given that it's a survival horror game from the same development team that created Resident Evil, I had high hopes for Dino Crisis, but it came up short in nearly every area. Let's start with the story: You are Regina (no last name given). You work for a government agency (no name given) who has sent you to infiltrate Ibis Island (whose name was only told in the ending, as far as I can recall). Gail and Rick (no last names that I heard) are your teammates on the mission, which is to infiltrate the island, find Dr. Kirk (a scientist who was presumably dead but has supposedly resurfaced on the island), and get him back to your home country (again, no name given, but let's say it's Bangladesh). This sounds more like the preliminary outline of a story rather than the final draft. The fact that there are almost no plot twists in the game just adds to the incomplete quality of the story, and what story content the game does have isn't that interesting. I'm one of the many people who enjoyed Resident Evil's hilariously bad voice acting, so I'm sad to say that the voice acting in Dino Crisis is actually quite good. However, it is funny how Regina constantly shrugs her shoulders during dialogue for no reason when saying everything from "That's disgusting!" to "Let's get outta here!" Dino Crisis' control is fairly bad. While the 180-degree turn is a very welcome addition, I found that I didn't use it very often and instead used the directional pad to manually turn. This is due to the fact that I'm used to turning that way in survival horror games, and it seems to take the game longer than it should to make you turn 180 degrees after you press the button. It would be much more intuitive if you could just back up and press square to turn around like you can in the Resident Evil 3: Nemesis demo included with Dino Crisis. Dino Crisis has mostly basic sound effects, including some weak dino roars that sound more like a giraffe dying than a fear-inducing roar out of a giant, dangerous beast. Again, the voice acting is good, with Gail having the best voice acting of the three main characters (Regina's voice is a bit too "Saved by the Bell" for me). I gave Dino Crisis an "Average" rating instead of a "Crappy," so there must be some redeeming qualities, right? Well, the graphics engine makes the game look great, and it's much better than Silent Hill's engine (even though Silent Hill is a much better game overall). Unlike Silent Hill, there is almost no fog to be seen anywhere in Dino Crisis. The dinosaurs are admittedly very beautiful. The raptors really look and move like raptors, and the T-Rex really looks and moves like a T-Rex. It even has moving eyes. While the T-Rex looks good, it isn't as impressive as the T-Rexaur monster found in Final Fantasy 8. Considering that FF8 has hundreds of monsters and Dino Crisis has around four, it's sad that Square can do a better job rendering a minor enemy than Capcom can do rendering the last boss in their entire game. I've heard from several different places that Dino Crisis' dinosaur animations are supposedly awesome, but I didn't think they were that impressive. FF8's T-Rexaur death animation is better than any animation I saw in Dino Crisis. I don't know what game a certain Imagine magazine was playing when they called Dino Crisis "the most frightening game of the year," but it sure as hell wasn't the same game that I beat in one sitting while never being truly scared once. A big part of the reason the game isn't scary is because it's so easy. I don't mean easy in the "easy puzzles" sort of way, as many of the game's puzzles are well thought out and fit in nicely with the story line. Dino Crisis is easy in the sense that a wounded, heavily bleeding, limping, 110-pound woman can easily out-run a giant, 65 million year old beast with a desire for human flesh. The only dinosaur that ever killed me throughout the entire game was the T-Rex and its cheap, one-hit kills. The T-Rex sequences are the worst-designed sections in any Capcom game I've ever played. I ran around in one section with a T-Rex chasing me on a balcony for what seemed like an hour trying as I tried to avoid the dino, use the turn move to escape from it, and basically play in vain until I found out how to beat it. It turned out that the solution was to back into the wall where it can't bite you. No skill whatsoever. Just back into the wall and stand there. If that's not bad game design, I don't know what is. Dino Crisis is one of the most disappointing games I've played all year. Don't buy it unless you enjoy wasting $40 of your hard-earned money. Send your thoughts on this review to rob@mastergamer.com
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