The game popularized a new
genre, which video game players call "survival
horror" and PC game players call "Alone in the Dark
clones." Dino Crisis was one of the many games that followed the Resident Evil
formula to the letter - its main selling point being
that it was from the same designers. Almost a year and a half after its release
on the PlayStation, Dino Crisis has been released for the PC. And though it has
some startling moments and a few fun sections, it's mostly just a mediocre
version of a mediocre game.
The primary difference
between Dino Crisis and Resident Evil is the story. Whereas Resident Evil took
its setting and its story from Night
of the Living Dead, Dino Crisis takes its setting and story from
Jurassic Park. You play as Regina, part of a military rescue team sent to a top
secret research facility to investigate an accident. The facility, in which a
new form of energy is being researched, is located on
an island. Something has gone wrong, and the island has been overrun with
dinosaurs. In fact, the plot is so much like Jurassic Park that late in the
game, one of your teammates exclaims, "It's just like that movie!"
Your team isn't much help, needless to say.
Other than the story, the game
is identical to Resident Evil. You run around the research facility while
picking up items, shooting things (dinosaurs, in this case), and solving
puzzles. The game is played from a third-person perspective, and the camera
angles change to create suspense. As in most games that borrow the concept of
Alone in the Dark's cinematic camera angles, much of the suspense in Dino
Crisis comes from the fact that you simply can't get a good look at things that
are attacking you. Unfortunately, the winding, narrow corridors of the facility
aggravate this issue and can make the combat frustrating. You'll be grateful
for the few scenes in the game in which the camera actually trails behind you.
The graphical problems of
Dino Crisis are made worse by the fact that the game does little to take
advantage of the superior PC hardware. It looks like an old PlayStation game.
The characters are blocky, and the backgrounds are pixilated almost beyond
recognition at times. Furthermore, the backgrounds occasionally slightly shake,
and textures move like liquid. This irritating effect is not unlike the jittery
animation found in the cartoon show Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, and it
may make you take those epilepsy warnings seriously.
Like Resident Evil, the
course of Dino Crisis is basically a series of door puzzles interrupted by the
occasional fight scene. The door puzzles in this case are uniformly easy - when
you find the key to open a new area, it will be very obvious where to go next.
And where Resident Evil would often give you some sort of exciting sequence to
break up the monotony, Dino Crisis doesn't give you much to do other than run
around the facility looking for keys and codes to open new areas. The worst
parts are the crate-pushing puzzles. For some reason, Regina can push a crate
only once, and once it's pushed, it's stuck in its new locale. One
crate-oriented maze in the latter section of the game can actually become a
premature end, and the weird save-game function (you can save only when leaving
certain rooms) makes the game's occasional dead ends all the more frustrating.
The combat isn't much better
than the puzzles. The dinosaurs act exactly like the zombies from Resident
Evil, only they're faster. Shoot them a few times, and they'll fall down. But
they might get back up again! This behavior makes sense in the undead, but it's
less creepy with a big lizard. You'll also notice very few distinct types of
dinosaurs. Your primary opponent is always the same dino, a sort of generic
large lizard-looking thing. And while your first encounter with a Tyrannosaurus
will give you a good start, your second and third probably won't. Besides, you
don't actually need to kill these beasts - you can always just run around until
an escape route opens.
Had Capcom decided to put more
effort into a PC version of Dino Crisis, the game would have been slightly
better. It would certainly look better, and all the standard problems with
video-game-to-PC translations, like the absence of a save-anywhere function,
would have been absent. But it's doubtful that Dino Crisis would have been more
fun. The problem with Dino Crisis is that even though it is an exact replica of
Resident Evil, it lacks the creepy atmosphere that made Resident Evil so
popular in spite of its problems. Like Resident Evil, it has bad voice acting
and frustrating camera angles. Unlike Resident Evil, it isn't scary. If you
love dinosaurs and you love Resident Evil, you'll likely get some satisfaction
from Dino Crisis. But those players outside of that limited demographic will
find the game to be generic at best.
Processor=
733MHz
RAM=
128MB
Graphics=
32MB
