A year after its original release in 1999 for the Playstation, Dino Crisis finally made it to the Dreamcast. For those who haven’t played the Playstation version, Dino Crisis is a survival horror game from Capcom that replaces Resident Evil’s zombies with dinosaurs. While there are a few more changes to the concept, Dino Crisis still feels like every other survival horror game that Capcom had previously put out. But is that such as bad thing?
Capcom is well known for porting their popular games to any platform that they could possibly make any money on. Sometimes they go out of their way and make the port feel unique, while other times we are left with games that just don’t feel like any effort was put into porting them over. Unfortunately, this is the case with Dino Crisis, which is identical to its Playstation counterpart. With no improvements to this version, let me just save owners of the Playstation version some precious time: this game is not worth buying if you own it on the Playstation.
But for those who don’t, Dino Crisis’ gameplay consists of dispatching dinosaurs, while solving puzzles to unravel the mysteries behind why the dinosaurs exist and who brought them to the present day. You take control (and by control I mean awkward controls from Resident Evil…) of Regina, a member of a special forces team sent in to investigate some bizarre activities on an island lab and to locate a presumed to be dead scientist. Sound familiar? Like I said, the game feels like Resident Evil with dinosaurs, which isn’t surprising since Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami also made this game.
The combat in the game consists of a game of ammo management and gunning down dinosaurs before they reach you. While it’s not all that compelling, it can be quite fun to blast a raptor before it reaches you. However, the zombies, I mean dinosaurs, aren’t particularly fast, making it more of a game of conserving ammo for the right enemies. But the game has quite a bit of ammo lying about, so Regina won’t have to fret too often over to kill or not to kill.
The one interesting element to Dino Crisis’ combat is that Regina will often bleed from her attacks. Bleeding gradually decreases her health, making it important to patch up your wounds before running to the next room. I found this to work fairly well, but it doesn’t add as much depth as I would have liked. But at least it helps the game distinguish itself from Resident Evil somewhat.
The game also features a rather awkward item storage system. Since Regina has a limited carrying capacity, she must find plugs to open up places to store ammo and healing items. Unfortunately, this requires you to backtrack through potentially long distances. Also since the storage system doesn’t make the items stored carry over to the next storage system, Regina at times may leave an area with several important healing items and ammo left behind and essentially useless.
The puzzles in the game essentially consist of hunting down discs to decode door locks and pulling switches in the proper order. Once you find the decoding discs, cracking the codes to the door locks are insultingly easy. I just feel that if I have to run around searching for discs, at least make it worth my time and challenge my mind a little. I would have enjoyed actually having to think when cracking the door lock’s code. Speaking of mind numbingly boring puzzles, I wish the game would have included more real puzzles to offset the switch flipping. Overall, the puzzles just didn’t hold up as well as other games in the genre.
Graphically, Dino Crisis looks exactly like it did on the Playstation, which is just laziness on Capcom’s part. The game could have taken advantage of the Dreamcast more powerful hardware, but maybe that’s asking a bit much out of a Capcom port. Even more unfortunate is just how disappointing the game looks nowadays. I’m not saying that Dreamcast games can’t look good, because there are certainly some that still do, but Dino Crisis isn’t a Dreamcast game; it’s a bad port of a Playstation game.
The sound is actually quite a better, and it holds up pretty well today. I enjoyed the background music, as it got my blood pumping at the right moments. The voice acting, while still campy, wasn’t that painful on the ears. There were actually times that I enjoyed listening to some characters, which is saying a lot for early survival horror games. Additionally, the dinosaur shrieks, gunshots, and grunts of battles all sounded believable, especially for their time.
The game does try to add some replay value to the game by adding a few different paths in the game which lead to one of three different endings. While the core story will remain mostly the same, it is nice to see that developers took the time to add something that is actually worth replaying the game for. There are also a few other rewards for beating the game, but I can’t spoil all the fun can I?
Don’t get me wrong; Dino Crisis is a great game. But, this is a lackluster port of a year old (at the time) Playstation game in which no effort was put into making it feel like a Dreamcast game. Poor graphics and no use of analog are just inexcusable, since they are a large part of what makes the Dreamcast what it is. Survival Horror fans will definitely have fun with this game; just don’t expect anything radically different.