Find key, open door, push box, kill dino,...

Capcom’s Resident Evil was released onto the unprepared Playstation-gamers in 1996. The game became an impossibly huge hit and a new genre was born: Survival Horror. Some PC-gamers diminutively call it an Alone in the Dark rip-off, but that criticism isn’t entirely justified.
Dino Crisis was one of those games that imitated the tested and popular Resident Evil-formula to the fullest detail – unsurprising since the same team of game designers was responsible for it.
Now, about a year and a half after its debut on the Playstation console, Dino Crisis is released for the PC, and although it does conjure some exciting moments and cool situations onto your monitor, unfortunately it remains a mediocre version of a mediocre game.

The biggest difference between Dino Crisis and Resident Evil is the storyline. Where Resident Evil took numerous zombie movies as its rolemodel, Dino Crisis obviously chose for Jurassic Park. You play Regina, an attractive soldier who is part of a military rescue team, sent to a highly classified research centre to investigate an “accident”. This centre, where a new form of energy is being studied, is situated on a remote island; for some reason this island is crawling with dinos – the carnivorous kind.
Sound familiar? The story sounds so much like Jurassic Park that farther along in the game one of your team members cries out “Just like in that movie!” Like in so many games of this kind, your team isn’t of much use.

Story aside, this game is nearly identical to Resident Evil. You walk around, find items to pick up, shoot enemies (in this case dinosaurs) and solve puzzles. Like most games of this genre, you play from a third-person point of view, where the camera angle moves around to create a maximum amount of excitement – or tries to. Just like in most games that, in a time long gone, took Alone in the Dark as an example, these movie-like camera angles add to the tension. The often repeated – but mostly successful – trick is that you can rarely see clearly what’s attacking you. But!
Unfortunately the winding, and especially narrow hallways of the centre turn fighting a frustrating experience.. I was actually grateful for the couple of scenes where the camera was placed BEHIND my character, giving me a clearer view of the situation.

The graphic display of Dino Crisis only adds to the frustration. The game suffers from that fact that the makers hardly took advantage from the possibilities that the superior PC-hardware possesses, when compared to those of a Playstation. It just looked like an old Playstation game, especially to a visually spoiled PC-gamer like myself. The characters look blocky, the backgrounds are a mess of pixels - which doesn’t stop them from shaking. Also the textures sometimes get that yucky liquid feel to them.

Like in Resident Evil, in Dino Crisis you have to solve some puzzles – an occupation that is sometimes interrupted by a fight scene. The so-called “door puzzles” are all of the same easy calibre. Once you find the key to make a new area accessible, it is fairly obvious which direction to take. But where Resident Evil sometimes showed an exciting clip in between, to put some variation in image and pace, in Dino Crisis you just keep running around, looking for keys for yet another new location.
The worst part are the puzzles where you have to push crates though – yep, I see you know what I mean. But contrary to other “box-pushers” like Tomb Raider, Regina can only move a box once; then the box is irrevocably in its new position. How realistic. And believe me, if you do a wrong push at certain places, get stuck, and have to play a whole part over because of the strange save-game system, it takes a brave gamer to press “restart” instead of “quit”.

The combat parts aren’t much better than the puzzles. The dinos behave just like the zombies in Resident Evil, the one difference being they’re faster. With a couple of bullets you can send them back to the prehistoric age. Now get this: just like the zombies, they can get back up! For zombies this was somewhat believable, but dinos?? I suspect they’ve been taking acting lessons in order to play in the latest Disney movie…
There are different types of dinosaur, the most common one being a big lizard-like creature. My first encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex did give me a scare, but my second and third confrontation was a lot less exciting. By the way, you don’t really need to kill them, often it’s enough to run around until you find an escape route.

If Capcom had made an effort to turn this PC-version into something better, this Dino Crisis would probably have been a cool game. It definitely would have looked better, and all the typical “console-to-pc” transformations like the addition of a “save-wherever-you-want”-option would have made the gaming experience much more enjoyable.
But I doubt that all of this would have turned this into an above average game. Contrary to Resident Evil, there is no nail-biting non-stop excitement, no sign of the creepy atmosphere that pulled the zombie shooter out of mediocrity. It just isn’t scary enough to be called a true “survival-horror” game. Shame.