Dino Crisis comes from the creators of Resident Evil and focuses on a special agent by the name of Regina, who is sent, with her allies, to a secret scientific base on Ibis Island to retrieve Dr. Kirk, a scientist who was supposedly dead. Once there, they run into a serious amount of trouble in the form of dinosaurs.

A lot more than Resident Evil meets Lost World, Dino Crisis is a fun, challenging game with a useful item mixing menu system that allows you to upgrade medicine and create anesthetic darts (which, more often than not, are more effective than bullets). The game is fun and plays smoothly, forcing you to think out how to deal with the fast-moving dinos, rather than blasting away as you might want. Unlike Resident Evil, the monsters are fast and can put you in a world of hurt, quickly.

Within the game, the character and monster animations are smooth and the voice-overs are far better than in previous Capcom games. As always the CG rendered cinemas are detailed and look great. The gameplay is fairly similar to previous Capcom games, except that there seems to be a greater sense of urgency, especially since the enemy moves a lot faster and has no problem doing you in. Also, on occasion, they manage to get through doors. The shock value of the gameplay is fairly good.

Drawbacks in this game come few and far between. First of all, most of the backgrounds appear the same, giving the overall game a similar feeling. Some variety of color might make differentiating between rooms easier. Also, why was there no First-Person perspective option like in Tomb Raider or Vagrant Story? What's the use of making a game in polygon environments if you can't look around or rotate the camera? Also, the minigame "Operation: Wipeout" really doesn't seem to have much reward to it. Unlike RE3, beating the minigame doesn't gain you anything.

Don't get me wrong: this game is a blast. There is a fairly decent amount of replay in this title. You'll want to play through at least twice to get both story lines, and maybe even a third time to get all of the endings. I've just addressed a few changes that will make the sequel even better.

- - kinderfeld