Dino Crisis 3

Back in 1999, Shinji Mikami started up a new survival horror franchise. It seems as the famous Resident Evil director wanted to take the genre to a completely different scenario. Mikami created a new game saga called Dino Crisis, a long story short, a survival horror where the monsters are real dinosaurs. Obviously, such an amazing thing was a complete success for the PC and Dreamcast and led to a sequel, and that led to Dino Crisis 3. Sadly this third part, not directed by Mikami, was the end of the franchise, at least so far. So, how could a single game kill an uprising and exciting franchise?

The plot

The year is 2548, and the Earth lost all contact with the U.N. Ozymandias over three hundred years ago, This is when suddenly the spaceship reappears near Jupiter, and a special team called S.O.A.R. is sent to research what happened. Just when the special team approaches the ship, the Ozymandias shoots and blows up the Seyfert, the S.O.A.R. ship.

Sonya Hart, Patrick Tyler, McCoy, and commander Jacob Rashaw are the only survivors of the explosion and manage to get inside the Ozymandias to find everything still functioning. But suddenly they face a giant Australis, a dinosaur-monster that eats McCoy, only to get devoured by a bunch of Rigel, some eel-like creatures. The three survivors are set to find out if there's any other survivor in the ship while trying to find a way to escape themselves. This is when they find a mysterious girl named Caren Velázquez. From then on everything turns into an odd series of events where they have to fight these dinosaur-like monsters as they try to escape and uncover the mysteries.

What went wrong

As you may have realized, no dinosaurs were mentioned so far here, right? Well, that's because in this title there are no real dinosaurs at all. Instead, we have these mutations based on the DNA of different dinosaur species. This alone may not be such a bad thing, but when you think about it, part of its predecessor's attractive was the fact that you were fighting real dinosaurs.

Still, that wasn’t the only thing that killed off the series, this game was an Xbox exclusive. It didn’t ever receive a PS2, Gamecube or even a PC version. And the whole game lacks creativity too. When you compare it with Dino Crisis 2 there’s nothing really new, and they even removed many things from the game.

Just two tears after this, Shinji Mikami went ahead and directed Resident Evil 4, one of the biggest and most successful survival horror games ever. So, the mechanics were not really up to the times, and the lack of creativity sent the series back to the ground.

Review

The game itself could be greatly improved just by tweaking some simple stuff, but at the end of the game, you’d get a boring game. The puzzles are repetitive and boring, and the fights, though fun at first, become really monotone in no time. We’ve seen a lot of remakes lately, and reboots of game series, so let’s hope they try to take on Dino Crisis one more time. And maybe then we can all just forget about Dino Crisis 3.

• Graphics and Visuals: Probably the best aspect of the game, the CG was pretty good. Monster design was nice-looking, the characters had facial expressions, and overall it looks alright. But the art direction is as boring as the rest of the game at the end of the day.

• Sound: The nearly non-existent soundtrack is just terrible whenever it appears. The sound effects are low quality and seem out of place.

• Gameplay: The controllers are alright, it isn’t hard to understand them and master them in no time. But the locked camera is completely messed up. This could be one of the killing aspects of the game as a whole. It messes up the controllers, confuses directions and even has many glitches.

It used to be that Dino Crisis was a more balls-out version of Resident Evil the action was faster, the ammo was in higher supply, and the monsters were more aggressive. Well, Dino Crisis 3 takes that formula, injects it with 10 times the pep, kills off the weak survival-horror controls (good riddance!), and tosses the whole thing into...space?

Yup, that's right. Dino 3 takes place about 500 years in the future on a beastie-filled spaceship named Ozymandius. The ship has been MIA for about 300 years at the game's outset when it suddenly returns to terrestrial space, jam-packed with hungry, intelligent dinosaurs. How the dinos got aboard is anyone's guess, as is how their brains grew so much. Regardless, combine these bad boys' larger cranial capacity with their gigantic jaws and razor-sharp teeth, and you have something that's superior to a human in every way. That's scary.

You won't be playing as just any human, though. Patrick, the main character, is decked out with some crazy gadgets. Coolest of all is the jetpack, which allows you to fly in any direction.

And Patrick's armed to the teeth with all sorts of futuristic heavy weaponry. He'll automatically aim his laser rifle at any creature in his field of vision, ensuring very little wasted ammo. He has some even nastier little tricks up his sleeve, too, called Wasps. They're drones that fly out of his back to seek and destroy any enemies they can find. Think about it: flying, intelligent guns. Pretty useful, considering some of the wild environments.

Speaking of which, don't think of your time inside the ship as the usual romp through access tunnels--the Ozymandius is far from your average spacecraft. Its insides are constantly shifting, with passages opening and closing, and entire room layouts morphing as you solve puzzles or time passes. From what we've seen so far, the game has a pretty large exploration component, so the dynamic environments could be pretty cool.

In any case, we're stoked Dino 3 is diverging from the stagnant survival-horror formula. But intelligent, space-pirate dinosaurs? Exactly how far is Capcom trying to take this thing?