Capcom's lineup this year was chock full of sequels to franchise titles. In addition to new Resident Evil and Steel Battalion games, the Dino Crisis series got a huge facelift. A far cry from its forerunners, Dino Crisis 3 (due in August 2003) takes players out of the jungles and compounds of the previous games and into outer space. While the prospect of this seems a little contrived, the possibilities for this new environment are vast.
Capcom's press release rattles off a laundry list of features. "Equipped with hyper-speed booster units, players will explore and maneuver quickly throughout the massive polygonal environments to collect objects, solve puzzles and achieve their objectives. This new type of control is a break from anything done before in the Dino Crisis series. It offers new challenges and more freedom of movement. Gamers will now be fully armed with futuristic artillery including WASPs, drones that lock-on to an enemy and automatically begin a deadly barrage of fire, to ward off the ravenous dinosaurs. Visually, Capcom has focused its attention on achieving a sense of scale and solidifying the craft's detail."
The WASP feature is reminiscent of Phantasy Star Online's mags. Little hovering drones that help you out in battle are hardly a new concept, but they'll bring a welcome change to the combat of survival horror. The booster packs seem to work pretty well when you're cruising around on the ground, but they don't allow you to jump higher than about 15 feet or so, so they're not really jetpacks so much as ground propulsion assistants. Controlling them can be a bit of a hassle when the camera angle changes every 10 feet or so.
This leads us to a common issue among these games, where the element of surprise is dependent upon keeping the camera in one spot so you can't see enemies coming. While this can be effective at times, it doesn't work well in the massive sprawling environments of a spacecraft. The game follows what I see as a trend this year in making everything much bigger. The environments, the dinosaurs and the game itself are all huge. While graphical quality is high, it suffers a lot because you're not able to see it all at the same time.
The control scheme seems to have followed the camera issues from the previous games. Walking around is a task by itself. When the camera angle changes, you have to entirely reset your compass, as sometimes the change is a complete 180-degree turn. The auto-aim that's used is pretty quick, but it takes a good while to get used to. In the 15 minutes I spent playing the demo through the first time, I just couldn't get a good grasp on why they chose to make it work in this fashion. I suppose the difficult camera angles forced them to do things this way.
As with all survival horror games, you'll be forced to solve all kinds of puzzles. The puzzles in Dino Crisis 3 seem to consist mostly of pushing buttons and trying to figure out what those buttons do. I was frustrated in the demo itself, and I can imagine becoming very annoyed with the final version of this title. The ability to reshape the ship sounds like a lot of fun, but without a proper indication of what's going on you'll be left guessing what it was you reshaped and why you did it. Hopefully a lot of these issues are dealt with in the full version of the game, but if they aren't, I can't see myself being very excited about it.
If there's anything about the title that I enjoyed, it's the graphical quality. Huge, sprawling environments contain the well-detailed creatures suitably, but one eventually begins to wonder why dinosaurs are wandering around on a spacecraft. I suppose it will all be explained in due time. I can honestly barely see myself picking up this title as I feel the series has already reached its peak. While Capcom has tried very hard to take a different direction on the title, I think the gameplay mechanics can easily be replicated by playing the original Dino Crisis, then going for some Gun Valkyrie action. Even for huge fans of the series, I think this title may be a big disappointment.
