Dino Crisis is an easy sell on paper: what if Resident Evil had dinosaurs instead of zombies? To sweeten the deal, what if it was created by the same team that made Resident Evil? Fans will balk at this simple description that has (debatably) plagued Dino Crisis since its inception, but its more true than it isn't.
Dino Crisis got its start as an alternate take to Resident Evil's "survival horror" genre. For Dino Crisis, the team at Capcom wanted to make something called "panic horror", where instead of the terrifying, lumbering zombies that compartmentalized Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion, you were constantly being hunted by aggressive, intelligent dinosaurs. Mechanically, the difference is that when you are injured you would bleed on the ground if you didn't use a specific health item to stop it. Bleeding on the ground would allow dinosaurs to find you if they were in an adjacent room. Certain dinosaurs, such as the raptors, could open doors, making running through rooms quickly avoiding enemies no longer as safe as it was in Resident Evil. When played, it isn't really all that different. Dinosaur AI and health is certainly more intimidating than Resident Evil's zombie enemies, but that doesn't mean it is enough for all-new genre classification.
The most notable thing about Dino Crisis outside of its kinship with Resident Evil, is in how good it looks. Rather than using prerendered graphics like its sister series, Dino Crisis boasts actual polygonal environments and some rather impressive lighting for a game from 1999. Because of the live rendered nature of the environments, Dino Crisis also boasts panning or dollyed camera shots that further the impact of certain set pieces, such as an extremely intense scene where you are tasked with running away from a lumbering T-Rex while on a roof. On a technological level, Dino Crisis is impressive, although I found insubstantial visual glitches to be relatively common.
Mechanically the game works well for a survival horror game. Ammunition and health is relatively scarce throughout, making every dinosaur encounter incredibly tense. Dino Crisis introduces a mixing mechanic, where you will find blue items that are useless on their own, but can be mixed together to produce things like knockout darts and health packs of varying strengths. In a way, this can make the game a bit too easy, but since your inventory is so limited (not as much as Resident Evil, thank God), this ease is mostly dependent on how close you are to a given lockbox with what you want at any given time. The game introduces lockboxes that are unlocked using plugs, which can be found in the environment (almost always behind some moveable shelf). The lockboxes are replacements for the dimensionally inconsistent save room box from Resident Evil. Where as in Resident Evil the save room box was accessible from any save point, lockboxes are independent of one another, meaning you have to find the one with what you want in it. Likewise, these are rarely in save rooms, meaning you may be accessing them with raptors hot on your tail (an intense situation if what you are trying to grab is ammunition or health). Another complexity to them is that they are color coded: green for health items, red for ammunition, and yellow for a mix of the two. While this doesn't wildly change the game from Resident Evil, it did make me feel a bit more spread out and stressed, unsure of what items I had access to across the various lock boxes and worried I had wasted too many resources to continue with the game. It is to the game's credit that this never seems to be true, but the feeling was there nonetheless. That said, if I did know of something I wanted from a particular box, getting there could be a chore.
The environment in Dino Crisis is pretty dull. The story goes you are Regina, part of a covert military team sent out to an island to retrieve a researcher who has been labeled deceased. Your team has intelligence saying that his death was faked, and that the island is host to a secret military facility experimenting on a new form of energy. How this leads to dinosaurs I'll let you figure out yourself, as it and the story as a whole is not very interesting or good (but it is serviceable enough). Thus, you spend the entire game in a research facility. Resident Evil's final area - a research facility - is debatably that game's worst. Likewise this is true for Resident Evil 2, and likewise the location theme fairs as well here. There just isn't much enjoyment in looking around the research facility the way there was in the Spencer Mansion, which in turn makes several of the puzzles much less interesting to figure out. So much of the location is just random computers and desks that don't really invoke anything outside of banality, with the occasional super computer that feels standard by the late PS1 era. My theory here is that Dino Crisis was intended as a blend of several popular things from the late 90s: Resident Evil, Jurassic Park, and Metal Gear Solid. There is a cinematic quality to Dino Crisis that reminds me of a much less skilled version of Metal Gear Solid, and its location feels like it speaks to that. It is admirable in a lot of ways, but in execution it feels like it gets in the way. Puzzles require a lot of backtracking, reading files and interacting with computers, some of which look no different from the computers you can't do anything with. Without an interesting space to explore, backtracking feels much more of a chore than it should have, and while there is at least one puzzle I thought was rather inventive that has you rewriting an ID card early in the game, most puzzles virtually require you to find a room with a file in it and remember the code written within. To be totally fair, the game has other puzzles like the DDK discs which are fun, but finding these discs can at times require backtracking, or solving puzzles that themselves require backtracking.
The thing is, I love survival horror games, and so I enjoyed my brief time with Dino Crisis. That said, I don't necissarily write these reviews to my own bias, and I know that if I were given a pick of survival horror games to play, this just wouldn't rate very high. I understand the appeal of this game's approach to the genre, dinosaurs being a fun and often underappreciated idea in games these days, and I would most certainly buy a remake in the style of Resident Evil 2 (2019), but an idea can only get you so far - especially one that's silly like this one - and the game just doesn't quite hold up its end of the bargain. It is firmly worth a play if you are a fan of this sort of thing, and it is impressive in its own technical right, but it pales in comparison to other heavyweights in the genre.
6.5
