Dino Crisis is a dinosaur survival horror game developed by Capcom, and released for the Playstation 1, SEGA Dreamcast and Windows. Directed by Shinji Mikami of “Resident Evil” fame, along with a team dubbed “Capcom Production Studio 4, he apparently wanted to “move away from fantasy elements into something “more real”, and cited Jurassic Park and Aliens as influences” according to EDGE Magazine UK (71): 40–43. I’ll be honest this certainly isn’t past the realm of fantasy for zombies, so I’m not sure what he was going for with that as while dinosaurs are real, the plot brought them back to the then current time period using stuff that could possibly be in fantasy (will explain soon). I’m not sure where I first heard of Dino Crisis, but I know that everyone who knows survival horror and Resident Evil will be bound to know what Dino Crisis is since their lineage is so close, so joined by the hip to each other. A lot of the same people worked together, it has a similar love for closed off environments, fixed camera angles and a lack of supplies except it just has dinosaurs. I played this on the Playstation 3 digital store, as back then they threatened to close down the store permanently and I had a lot of spending money and lived with my parents during the COVID era. So I went on a spree, bought all the exclusives and games I could possibly want and this one was one of them. I haven’t touched a lot of these games since, still waiting for what the right time is to actually play them. This came about because every Saturday I stream a game for a friend of mine (the same one who I streamed Christmas Massacre, Kowloon’s Curse: Lost Report and Eternal Evil for) and this one was the next one on the list she chose. With that in mind, I dug into the world of old survival horror and completed my first actual old survival horror game ever (unless you count Blue Stinger as the oldest but who knows) and came out with thoughts.

The plot overall was something that I could honestly consider something between kinda memorable and good, but not really memorable enough to really do a plot recap on (at least for now, but what I’ll say is if you want a plot recap, the wikipedia page is below). The reason I’m kind of copping out here is that honestly, the story didn’t really pull me in that much sadly, other than the main lead (Regina) being charismatic and charming, having a distinct look and a playful attitude. Regina as a protagonist doesn’t have much of a backstory if at all, just a special forces lady going in and stomping shit out and that’s cool enough for me in this case. The only other three characters of note are Rick, Gail and Kirk. Rick feels like the stereotypical comic relief and didn’t really do much for me as a character sadly other than providing the “mission comes last, we gotta get out of here” routine. Gail has the no-nonsense “the mission comes first” attitude which was cool I guess, and had enough vague wording that there was potential for another “Albert Wesker” turn thing, with the vibe that he knows way more than he’s letting on. Kirk is the stereotypical mad scientist villain, with notes scattered around about his anti-social douchebag behavior and general love for crossing the ethics while others comment about possibly poisoning him and other such stuff. In fact, the main thing that pops out to me about the plot is “The Third Energy”, Kirk’s pet project where he I believe uses pockets of time as an energy source and an accident occurred, bringing the dinosaurs to the modern day (I could be misrepresenting this, my apologies if I did). This data on his unlimited energy source, which the government wanted to have as a potential weapon against their opponents. This is what made the mission high priority and ultimately I like the idea of The Third Energy. I guess my main thing is that while there are certain things that make it stick out, the whole package feels kind of shallow otherwise. Who knows, maybe I’m just a dummy idiot fuckface and maybe one day I’ll change my words and do a recap but at the moment that’s just how I feel.

The one thing I will give this game credit for is the multiple choice stuff, and the attitudes that the characters take between them. Regina is definitely in the middle between Gail’s and Rick’s vibe, so it’s kind of a perfect display of the dynamic between the three and could make any choice you do make feel realistic to the lead herself. This also factors into the endings, of which there are three, the third having two different variations (leave with Rick, follow Gail or go to the heliport AND then find Kirk independent I think? The guide I put down there is a lot better with explaining). I got the best ending, which has everyone escape alive with Kirk captured, and the mission ends with Kirk working under the government yet again while the agents are ready for the next mission. It wasn’t ground breaking and over the top as the more popular cousin Resident Evil, and I don’t really think that it’s meant to be persay. The game feels like what could be a summer blockbuster movie, with certain ideas and themes being present that make it memorable but you don’t remember much other than the lead and killing dinosaurs. That’s fine, not everything has to be this in depth lore drop that a lot of other games have. What I think this game is more notable for are the improvements to the “survival horror” formula, and fucking god are there some interesting yet personally divisive concepts.

You know, I’m not even joking when I say that this game definitely puts the SURVIVAL in survival horror because I was struggling throughout the entire game. As per the usual survival horror stuff, you have to balance your health and ammo reserves, making space in your inventory while solving puzzles and picking up items to progress to the next area. I’ll start with the dinosaurs as I went into this game blind to the AI behavior that Shinji and Capcom cooked up. These fuckers are smart compared to zombies, you can’t always gank them around tables or surfaces as they’ll jump on top of the tables and follow you from room to room (though I think only one room?) to take you out. Some of the encounters open with just finding them in a room but some of them include quick time events, which aren’t always common but they’re there. Luckily this you just tap a bunch of buttons really quickly and it’s fine, there’s no specific set of buttons that need to be pressed. Afterwards most times you’ll have the choice to run away or actually fight them. I always chose to run like a bitch due to the lack of ammo and their resilience, which can have mixed success considering their AI is a bit too effective.

They’re fast as hell and really goddamn hard to kill and as such with the limited amount of inventory space you have it’s more than likely that you won’t be able to kill more than one or two with whatever shotgun ammo you have. The pistol is mostly kind of useless and only good for whittling down the dino’s health before finishing it off with another weapon or as an extreme backup. I don’t remember all of the guns but I think it might just be those two and the grenade launcher, which you’ll only find much later in the game. You can also find custom weapon parts around the map (mostly behind locked cabinets) that you can fit onto your gun for I guess stats boosts. Keep in mind I played on normal difficulty, and with how the AI reacts compared to the movement speed and such I also had a difficult time getting headshots to kill any of them. The guide I used recommended that I mix a lot of “Resuscitation” and “AN. Dart L” to create poison darts and to stockpile them for later in the game. I didn’t do that and instead got my asshole stomped plenty of times so it’s probably recommended you do that but to each their own.

So what’s the mixing like in the game? Well there’s two different kinds of health items, the normal ones like medium health kits for example and stuff you can only use combined with other items (like Intensifiers and An. Aid). From here you can combine them to create all sorts of stuff from med kits that give you even more health to the aforementioned poison darts though it doesn’t seem like you can create any ammo sadly. Another item/mechanic they put into the game is Hemostat, which stops blood loss. That’s right, you can bleed out in this game and what makes it worse is that you’ll be more easily tracked by dinosaurs WHILE you’re bleeding out so you’ll need to either wait it out a bit or stop the bleeding as soon as possible. Where do you get these items? Randomly throughout the environment of course, though if you find a bunch of plugs you can unlock color coded “Emergency Boxes”, which also functions as the game’s storage box. You can unlock these boxes all over the base, though you can only access certain colored boxes items from the same color. For example, say you unlock a blue box on the first floor and put a ton of ammo in it; and then you go down to the basement and you find another blue box as well as a red box. You can unlock the blue box and switch between the two locations and grab your stuff back (as each location has their own inventory) but grabbing stuff from the red box is its own separate thing. The one thing I really didn’t care about Dino Crisis with is the complexity of such things, in fact the needless complexity of such things. I kind of find this system to be cool as a concept but a pain in the ass in other ways, and it’s the same thing with door codes.

I’ll go into door codes/puzzles in the same sort of breath: in order to unlock certain doors you need to find DDK Input Discs along with the Code Discs, oftentimes in separate locations. They all have certain letters attached to them (like D for example) so it’s easy-ish to recognize but there were a couple of times where I’ll admit I got frustrated with the needless complexity of it all. Once you gather these DDK whatever the fucks, you have to go up to the door and decipher a code based on a phrase and take certain letters and numbers out of it. They explain it well enough the first time but I’ll be honest, after a bit I just broke out a guide and cheated because I didn’t really feel like going through all of that. Is that on me? Yeah probably, I suck at puzzles and some of the puzzles here are a bit of a mixed variety. Some puzzles like the colored generator plug puzzles are simple to get ahold of, while others like the crane puzzles can be a bit of a pain in the ass to figure. Granted, again I did use a guide again for this (located below) and it only appears twice I believe but it wasn’t my favorite to try to figure out without it. Otherwise my experiences with the puzzles for the most part were fine, can’t say much about that because again I did use a guide for some parts.

The last bit of gameplay I want to go with are choices: through certain parts of the game you’ll be given a choice between Rick’s method or Gail’s method of doing things. These branching patterns offer different experiences in terms of accessing different rooms earlier, varying in which path is quicker or slower and luckily generally don’t affect much of anything other than that. That is until the very last choice in the game, whether to escape or to chase down the doctor. There’s two different choices between Rick and Gail, but the third/fourth option involves choosing one of them, going down to the Helipad and then running into the doctor around a certain location (not sure if it’s randomized or not). Doing certain endings will unlock certain costumes (like the military costume for example) that don’t offer much in the way of bonuses as far as I’m aware but different looks on newer playthroughs. If you beat the game under certain circumstances (apparently under 5 hours of playtime, under 3 saves OR 0 continues) then you should unlock Operation: Wipeout, a sort of minigame where you have to kill a bunch of dinosaurs. In my playthrough I did 0 continues and ALMOST under 5 hours and I thought I only had to do one of them, so I’m unsure if I’m missing something or if I have to do ALL of them in order to beat the game but I guess it’s a little thing that’s cool for the Dino Crisis experts ya know?

What’s to say about the graphical design of Dino Crisis? It debuted on old Playstation and Dreamcast hardware so of course I’m going to love the shit out of it. I love old graphics, I’m a weak ass bitch and I’m biased as hell towards it so I won’t complain in any way whatsoever about the models of the characters or the environment. In fact, a 3D rendered engine with real-time environments was used for the game and honestly It looks pretty damn good with that. Character models mainly consist of either scientist looking types, the main special forces characters and the dinosaurs (though Regina’s special outfits have a unique enough look that throws the atmosphere out of whack a bit and generally makes me giggle). The dinosaur models are honestly terrifying, they do a good job (along with their behavior and sound effects) of filling me with dread any time I see them just due to their size and how they looked.

If I were to complain about anything I guess I’d say that for pretty much all of the game you’ll mostly see metallic rooms, office spaces, warehouses and corporate structures along with science labs. That’s great and all, it certainly brings about a certain vibe that the game is going for but in all honesty sometimes I kind of wish they had more variation a bit. Apparently (according to "Dino Crisis". GamePro. No. 132. September 1999. pp. 48–50) there were plans for a jungle scene but the lack of super detailed environments and engine limitations forced that to go into the scrapyard, though we do see jungles in the sequel that came out a year later. Atmospherically wise they stuck with the claustrophobic indoors, and other than the criticism I had earlier I feel like that was a good call, with the ominous environmental cues with blood smeared on the walls and dead bodies contrasting with the oppressively empty metallic nature of the science base. Basically what I’m saying is even though it’s not always my cup of tea, it nails what it’s going for even if it’s not the most memorable environment to go through.

The audio portion of this game is something that I have no complaints about for the most part: the soundtracks are very orchestral with a lot of ominous noises droning, fast paced string sections and the usual safe room music that’s memorable to anyone who plays the game (shoutout to Set You at Ease). Composed by Sayaka Fujita, Makoto Tomozawa & Akari Kaida; I think that for the most part it fits in well with the bombastic and cinematic action-horror atmosphere that the game is going for. Other than the safe room music, nothing else comes to mind really in terms of the most memorable tracks for me personally though I did notice that “Where’s the Survivor” reminded me of a much better Resident Evil: Director’s Cut “Mansion Basement” due to the use of brass instruments. This isn’t a diss on the Dino Crisis track, I just remember hearing it and it instantly reminded me of the mansion basement theme. Either way, the soundtrack is good and I won’t complain. However, I do want to point out one last thing about it: Why the hell is the soundtrack able to be purchased on Steam but not the base game itself? I feel like that’s such a weird slap in the face, like you’ll probably get some money back if you remaster Dino Crisis right and put it on PC for everyone to purchase.

Voice acting is also pretty decent for the most part, sounding a lot better and more cohesive than the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 even if the dialogue sometimes isn’t the most stellar. Adrian Truss is solid as the no nonsense Gail (as well as douchebag mad scientist Kirk) and Stephanie Morgenstern is great as the playful yet effective main character Regina but honestly the main person that popped out to me was Richard Yearwood as Rick. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing (though I don’t think it’s the voice actor’s fault) because sometimes the way Rick delivers stuff is hilarious but other times he kind of sounds a bit whiny for me. Otherwise everyone else kind of just fits in place and that’s perfectly okay. Environmental audio design wise it’s pretty solid too from the clanking of walking on metal, the sounds of opening doors, and the weapon sounds are all pretty good (though the dart gun sounds a bit underwhelming but it’s a dart gun, what can you do?). The dinosaurs themselves also sound very threatening and honestly terrifying at times which is funny because in that same EDGE magazine article from above Shinji Mikami apparently was disappointed with the cries of the dinosaurs? I mean if their cries openly fill me with dread I don’t see why there’s disappointment but then again I didn’t create the game so who knows ya know?

Overall, Dino Crisis to me is one of those games whose history I can sit down and appreciate, a concept whose impact can’t be understated. A survival horror game with dinosaurs? What’s not to love? Everyone loves this game, and I hear calls all the time for remasters, ports and remakes of the original game in the vein of the Resident Evil remakes. However, I don’t particularly like this game. I don’t hate it, in fact I hate saying that I didn’t care about it but there were a lot of concepts that I honestly didn’t care for, from the batshit insane puzzle DDSK Key shit to the somewhat frustrating difficulty of the actual dinosaurs itself. I feel like an idiot writing this, someone who's missing a piece of the puzzle to enjoyment of this game. However, my experience is my experience and I don’t think I can rightly say that I’d sit down and come back to this in the future. I guess consider this review as more of a personal one than an attack on its overall quality, and at the end of the day I’ll still commend people who love and enjoy the series as well as hope that this game along with the rest of the series get the revival that the fans deserve.

As for what happened with the future of Capcom, a whole lot of shit that I can’t describe in just one paragraph without a whole ass essay. However, the legacy of Dino Crisis itself again can’t be understated: a sequel would come around in the next year, passing the Y2K crisis and into the new millenia for a new sort of vibe. They would also come out with a light gun spin-off game: Dino Stalker, which I don’t hear too many people take care of as well as the franchise killer: Dino Crisis 3, an Xbox Original exclusive which basically curb stomped the franchise (and which I played and can personally say that I hated the half hour I played of it). Since then, there’s been whisperings of revivals, remakes and all the like as well as a blue ball tease in the form of Exoprimal, which flopped hardcore after gaining the attention of the community due to one of the characters looking exactly like Regina. Hell, even indie horror games like Dinobreak, The Isle and Compound Fracture are really getting into the survival horror dinosaur market so there is a niche for dinosaur horror that needs to be scratched. Even though I wasn’t a particular fan of this game, for the sake of the rest of the fans I hope this series gets the revival it frankly deserves as well as efforts into preservation via ports to PC and current consoles though I know that won’t be happening any time soon. Either way, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of the fuckers out there.

Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNPr6EfyJIg&ab_channel=Kain%27sGamingChannel (Youtube Soundtrack)

https://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks/album/dino-crisis-original-soundtrack-1999 (Soundtrack Downloads)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1568800/Dino_Crisis_Original_Soundtrack/ (Soundtrack Steam Page)

https://dinocrisis.co.uk/walkthrough/section5.html (Guide I used)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_Crisis_(video_game)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197128-dino-crisis/cheats (Unlockables)