Dino Crisis 2

Regina is once again roped into a crisis involving dinos. This time an entire research facility dedicated to researching the same energy that allowed dinosaurs into our time in the last game has disappeared in time. A team is dispatched through a stargate… I mean time gate to recover data and survivors.

Once the game started I realized, hey, I have a shotgun… That’s weird. I got a feel for the controls and noticed that when I aimed the shotgun, a little image of the gun appeared in the HUD with the number 100 in it. Wait, a hundred as in ammunition? A hundred shotgun shells? ONE-HUNDRED shotgun shells? It must be a percentage. When I fired the gun once, the number said ninety-nine. One-hundred shotgun shells. When I press the circle button I do a melee attack with a machete. I restarted the game to look at the start screen again. Yeah… it says “Dino Crisis” on it. Huh… I must have some kind of weird beta version where they accidentally put guns and ammo in it. Moments later, I’m blasting the ever-living fuck out of raptors while they attempt to ambush me as I’m running down a jungle game trail. What the hell’s going on here?

I get points for killing dinosaurs and extra points for higher combo kills. I can use the points at the save point computers to buy new weapons, weapon upgrades, first aid kits and various tools and equipment like armor.

The menu screen has… WHOA! A health bar? It’s even in the heads up display!

And the inventory has item names that make sense and aren’t part of some convoluted six part fetch quest? Are you insane?

And, HOLY SHIT! Some kind of file log where you can reread documents you’ve seen? Am I in the fucking Twilight Zone?

Girl on girl BDSM cut scenes ? …Wait, that didn’t happen.

First person vehicle driven rail shooter segments? Reminds me of the Jurassic Park arcade rail shooters.

What is this? Some kind of underwater segment with underwater weapons and underwater dinosaurs and a pneumatic propulsion system? You get to battle a plesiosaurus boss in an underwater reactor with a torpedo gun!

There is almost a dozen different dinosaurs in the game. Dinosaurs that swim and fly and even just run away when they see you. As far as I care to investigate, all of them are legit too. Even the Giganotosaurus which I had to look up. Yeah, it existed and yeah it IS bigger than a T-rex. In the game you can only kill it with a high powered satellite laser.

There are so many different and well-detailed environments that AREN’T just grey laboratories and loading docks. A lot of stuff looks like retaken Ingen facilities from the Lost World.

There’s a ton of awesome weapons and different things to buy. You probably won’t even get to give attention to all of them. Even the SUB weapons are awesome. Mines, insta firewalls and a Taser knife?

Even the time travel plot is a magnitude more interesting than the story from the first Dino Crisis and I couldn’t even hear half of it because of sound problems. Though I will admit that I actually liked the characters from the first one better, especially Rick.

This game is… fun. I mean the amount of fun is unprecedented and nearly unfathomable. I know it helped significantly to have low expectations in the first place but it’s still hard to understand. It’s like they fired the entire staff from the previous game or something. Dino Crisis 2 is completely different and on an entirely new level than Dino Crisis. It’s like comparing Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 or Terminator and Terminator Two. And they fixed EVERYTHING. I can only really complain about two things. The fixed camera angles still conceal what’s ahead of you from time to time and the dinosaurs respawn WAY too fast. Basically if you accidentally walk back onto a screen that you just cleared a second ago, All dinosaurs are back. Unless it was a one big dinosaur.

The paramount difference here is that they actually figured out that a franchise named “Dino Crisis” should probability revolve around KILLING DINOSAURS.