Dino Crisis (1999)

Beat on Normal with helicopter ending, 4 continues used. I died to the very first raptor while trying to kill it with the lousy pistol, which used up a resuscitation. That was 2 important lessons learned and I ran like hell the next attempt. The early game was very tense due to the lack of ammo, and I found myself avoiding many of the enemies. I considered alternate paths, focused kills on securing access to save rooms, item boxes and other important locations, and used tranquilizers for out of the way places. Early on I experimented with the mixing system and found out how to make poison darts. It was a very interesting trade off to use those resuscitations to make the best ammo in the game. I did not like that quantity was not considered and that there was no way to split stacks of items, 3 tranq darts + 2 resuscitations only made 1 poison dart, but so did 1 dart + 1 resuscitation. So I tried to avoid stacking stuff and use 2 tranq darts before making the last into poison. I do wonder if med kits could also be used to make poison as I had way more than I needed. I mostly used hemostats and medium med kits for healing, but had a lot of large med kits from mixing with recovery aids, intensifies, and multipliers. I had a ton of anesthetic aides that I did not realize could be mixed with each other to make more darts, but had more than enough ammo to beat the game. I ended with something like a dozen grenade rounds, several heat rounds, 10 slag shells, a dozen max tranq darts and a couple poison darts.

I used a continue at the second fight with the T rex because I tried to open the door after running and was a split second too slow. I did not know there was a quick 180 turn. The next fight with the T rex went poorly as I died, then got him stuck on the helicopter and used all my ammo. Wait this was not a real boss fight, just a survive for a time sequence. I reloaded and did it all over again. The late game seen me using quite a few poison darts and slag ammo, even a few grenade rounds. The puzzles up until that point were not too bad. I chose to side with Gail at first because she should follow the orders of the CO. Then I went with Rick for the escape hatch because that made more sense; the puzzle was easy with pause via psp menu and writing it down. I went with Rick again to construct the experiment parts, and that would have been incredibly obnoxious without a walkthrough because of how hard it was to figure out the codes. Rather be killing dinosaurs than fooling around with puzzles. The code doors were also obnoxious at the end, despite being braindead simple early on. The end game was so confusing with putting each piece in the proper location and using several terminals to start up the experiment that I used the walkthrough. I got the helicopter ending because I sided with Gail again to follow orders, and of course went exploring to the only place I had not yet been. I died to the T rex final fight because I thought I was supposed to only shoot while his mouth was open, but apparently that was too slow. I used a continue there, but it made no sense for the T rex to even be there. How was it even getting around in the basement? It was enough of a stretch for it to get down there on the freight elevator. And the hero should have killed it while it was unconscious; at least shoot it point blank in the eye to blind it.

This was a great Resident Evil spin off, and how the Jurassic Park games should have been. The whole Resident Evil formula is great and was even improved a bit with less fixed camera angles and some of the interesting mechanics of this game (laser shutters, tranquilizers, mixing, no save limit). But this game was not quite as good as the REs. It still had somewhat awkward controls and camera angles, as well as a lot of unnecessary backtracking. Even though weapons and quest items did not take up inventory space, the inventory management was overall worse with tiny ammo stacking (10 shotgun shells or 3 darts per slot!) and 3 different colours of item boxes that could only share items with the same colour and required special plugs to open. Why couldn't it have been a standard item box in each save room. It was novel at least and maybe you could stretch your imagination a bit more that the boxes were physically linked. The puzzles were more believable in that situation, but who the hell designed those cranes? I did appreciate the option to skip some puzzles in favour of combat. And as much as I loved the tranquilizer darts, the regular shotgun was disappointing. There was no blowing dino heads off with one shot. The lack of proper boss fights was a flaw and there could have been more variety in enemies.

8.0/10