On the downside, one thing that always seems to come up with this particular genre is the issue of control. Capcom, I applaud you for promoting alternative positive body images!) (While on the topic of graphics, I'd like to also mention as a side note that Regina has a fuller figure in a certain aspect than most videogame women are endowed with. With the PlayStation 2 due to arrive on store shelves in a month, I feel confident in saying that graphics on the PlayStation just aren't going to get any better than this. The game's intro scene could easily be mistaken for a feature film, and at points you'd swear you were watching real footage.
Since the hardware has less work to do, the character models look great and move quite fluidly.Ĭapcom has also vastly improved their CG movie techniques. Dropping the sterile, under-detailed 3-D areas of Dino Crisis 2 for prerendered backgrounds was definitely a step in the right direction. Not content to simply change the stale game design, the graphics in Dino Crisis 2 are beautiful and definitely improved over the dull original. Such diversions greatly help to keep the adventure from feeling like a one-note lesson in repetition and shows much more creativity and imagination than has been seen as of late. There's also a brilliant underwater area which uses different physics than the rest of the game. Going from one location to the next at certain points, you'll suddenly find yourself behind the trigger end of a large, mounted machine gun and fending off an angry herd of Triceratops, or using a flare gun to signal your partner where to launch mortar shells. In addition to the new focus on faster, more streamlined design, Dino Crisis 2 has added several quasi-minigames which break up the monotony that these games tend to develop. The repetetive back-and-forth "keyfetching"-which made up the bulk of previous survival horror gameplay-is almost completely gone with only a bare handful of "locked door" tasks remaining.
Dodging a huge Allosaurus, jumping from a ledge, running towards a door while dodging and swerving and then pausing to take out a Plesiosaur with an anti-tank cannon gives the game an entirely different flavor than any previous survival horror title-definitely a huge plus as far as I'm concerned.
The tighter, gunplay-oriented feel makes Dino Crisis 2 seem less like a game and more like an action movieby using the excellent sound effects and a pulse-pounding pace to full effect. The player can then use the points to buy more weapons, equipment upgrades or healing items at any of the plentiful save points throughout the game. The player is awarded "Extinction Points" for practicing genocide on a small scale using a multiple-kill combo system never before seen in survival horror. Each character has a main weapon which is used to deal out most of the dino-damage, and a sub-weapon which is used more for breaking up crowds of enemies, or to open certain doors.
You start the game as one of two commandos-Dylan, the stronger military-type character, or Regina, an intelligence agent with a penchant for an odd piece of armor. However, the twist here is that the emphasis is on action instead of suspense, and the feverish pace rarely lets up. Like most of the other games in the same category save its predecessor, in Dino Crisis 2 you control your character from a third-person perspective on top of static 2-D backgrounds. I think he pretty much nailed it there, and surprisingly, the formula is strong enough not only to stand on its own, but to be a very potent game in its own right. In fact, looking back at the list of games that qualify as survival horror, I'd pick only three as being the best representatives of what this type of game has to offer: Resident Evil for starting off the craze, Silent Hill for making things truly chilling and Dino Crisis 2 for putting an entirely different spin on how the game can be played.Ī friend of mine summed up Dino Crisis 2 nicely as a fleshed-out version of the mercenary minigame from Resident Evil 3. For such a young genre, it has quickly gained a feeling of "been there, done that" in the few years since its explosion onto the scene. Superficially they may seem different, but at the core they all play much like minute variations on the same theme. Unfortunately, most companies attempting to cash in in the success started by Resident Evil (including Capcom themselves) have been merely covering the same ground without really adding much to the formula. After Capcom broke new ground by putting the scare factor into games starting with the breakthrough title Resident Evil, an incredibly hot new style of game was popularized. "Survival horror" is a genre that has badly needed a shakeup.