Dino Crisis for PlayStation 1

When I bought this game I took a big risk. I had never played it before and neither had any of my friends. So I didn?t really know anything about it. I knew that it was a game about you killing Dinosaurs, but that was about it. Anyway I thought that it couldn?t be that bad of a game because I have heard that it is really fun (from the store manager) so I bought it.

I first popped it into my Playstation system when I got home to test it out. I was pleasantly surprised with the graphics, which were pretty sharp and not very blotchy at all. In fact throughout the game there are a few cinematic scenes that are pretty amazingly done. So things were going good, I guess you could say that I was off to a good start. The game first starts out with you, Regina, and your two companions Gail and Rick, (who are pretty important characters throughout the game) in a warehouse type area, trying to find some keys and getting introduced to some dinosaurs. The first thing I noticed when I actually started playing the game was that it was A LOT like the popular Resident Evil series. I mean A LOT!!

In both games you have the same view of the screen, (sort of the overhead helicopter view) and your options menu is virtually identical, but I guess that?s what you get when you have almost the same type of game made by the same company. I guess a really good comparison would be Bond and Perfect Dark for Nintendo 64. If Dino Crisis would have came out before Resident Evil then it would have been a more popular game. But it didn?t come out first so I guess we will just have to deal with it.

If any of you have ever played any of the Resident Evil games then you should probably have a good sense of what to do, and where to go. If you haven?t then let me try and explain: This game is basically just a big puzzle with dinosaurs lurking around every corner (which you have to either run away from or blow the hell out of.) You must go through many tasks of logic and common sense to be able to beat this game without a strategy guide. Don?t worry though because this will most defiantly not take you as long as Final Fantasy or some other Role Playing Game (RPG) would. If I remember correctly I think that Dino Crisis took be a little less then five hours to beat. Remember if you beat the game under five hours then you will get a bunch of special features, such as new missions and new costumes, but other then that I think that the ?cheats? that you get in most other games for beating them, are not that great in this one.

The replay value of this game in unfortunately another downside. Once you beat it you will NEVER play it again, unless you want to see the other endings (which are not especially good) so I would have to tell you to probably rent it a couple of times until you beat it and then return it, so this way you won?t be tying up as much money into the game as I did. You could probably rent the game twice and have it beaten and that would only cost you about ten dollars. Otherwise you would have to spend about $25-$30 on it.

So this is what I have tried to establish basically in this review: The graphics are a nice touch, but nothing to make you have a heart attack. The sound is decent, but I have heard better. The storyline is pretty unbelievable but I guess that a scientist experiment with dinosaurs could go wrong could happen but very unlikely. The most disappointing part of the game is as I previously mentioned, the replay value.

Overall I think that the game should get three stars out of five, because I know that it will only take you about five hours to beat, but those five hours are decent, and it should prove to be a better then average game.