The Haunted Hoard: Dino Crisis 2 (PS1)
The original Dino Crisis game portrayed dinosaurs in such a way that it managed to make them feel like the fearsome beasts they must have been. By presenting them through the lens of a survival horror game, each dinosaur encounter had a good chance of being fatal. Dino Crisis 2, on the other hand, decided to shift itself away from that take on these prehistoric reptiles, pushing heavily into the action genre. While in the original game an encounter with a single dinosaur could be a tense and dangerous showdown, in Dino Crisis 2, you’ll have likely blasted away over 20 raptors with your shotgun before you even reach the first save point.
The dinosaurs in Dino Crisis 2 definitely fold pretty easily when they face the player’s firepower. In some ways, this does make a bit of sense narratively. Taking place after the events of the first game, Regina has been able to share her knowledge about Third Energy, the force that had brought dinosaurs to modern times in the first place. When another incident involving the volatile energy source has transposed a city and its surrounding area into a different time, dinosaurs have begun to run amok, and who better than Regina to send in to help resolve the new incident? Joined by a strike team that knows what to expect and is armed with the proper gear to handle it, players will swap between team members Regina and Dylan as they blast their way into the dinosaur infested buildings to try and undo the time displacement, and while the source of the dinosaurs is no mystery, there are still questions up in the air to be resolved through investigating and story scenes. A group of armored assailants crop up to try and hinder the strike team’s progress at different points, their motivations and association with the incident perhaps the main mystery during an adventure that otherwise just involves shooting the highly aggressive wildlife in your way.
Outside of bosses and the occasional tough enemy, the dinosaurs found in Dino Crisis 2 aren’t incredibly resilient. Most any weapon you find along your adventure is capable of killing them in just a few shots, but despite this, the weapons do have different feels to them and different strengths. All of them are relatively easy to aim thankfully, your character targeting the nearest dinosaur when they draw their gun and the shots about as accurate as they should be from there, the player needing to adjust for highly agile foes but able to move freely and fire for the dinosaurs that require a more mobile approach. It does have the third person tank-like movement common of early Capcom survival horror games like Resident Evil and the original Dino Crisis, but being able to move and fire can overcome the small adjustment curve of remembering to move in reference to the camera angle and the fact left and right turn the character instead of move them in that direction. Regina and Dylan both have a few unique weapons to them despite sharing inventories otherwise, Regina leaning towards automatic weapons that technically require more ammo to down a dino but can be fired constantly compared to Dylan’s shotgun that can usually down anything in two blasts. Range is a consideration for weapon use, some dinosaurs keeping their distance until the moment they strike, but since very few creatures pack projectiles, the sci-fi Solid Cannon can simplify many battles once you find it along the way, it firing a short range energy orb that deals incredible damage despite its poor range. For the most part it does feel like Dino Crisis 2 tries to space its weapon availability so you gradually work up a ladder of power, the starting weapons already effective but the later ones still appreciatively stronger to make it feel like you earned them, because in Dino Crisis 2, almost all your equipment must be purchased off the back of a points system.
Dino Crisis 2’s enemy encounters usually go in one of two ways: the dinosaurs are either strong enough or strategically placed to face you in a set quantity, or they might as well be functionally endless, new animals leaping out to join the fray seconds after the previous ones fell. This is essentially how the game balances its incredible player power, the challenge coming from the abundance of enemies they’ll have to face along the way. Ammo conservation is of course an important consideration, but a more important one that definitely keeps the player involved in battle when sometimes they could just try and outrun the dinosaurs is the need to earn points by staying and fighting. Each room essentially has a combo counter until you leave it, the players efficacy in killing the dinosaurs quickly earning them Extinction Points that can be spent at save points to buy new gear, refill ammo, and purchase items like armor and health. While there are items to be found in the game world, the only way to replenish ammo is through spending your points, the game also asking the player to decide when to purchase a new gun or opt for something like an armor upgrade instead. The Extinction Points system necessitates moments of fighting the dinosaurs rather than fleeing, and here the dinosaurs manage to remain a threat by forcing the confrontations. You may be able to hold off a few raptors well, but the numbers they come in will allow some to get the drop on you, the need to balance your health with risking these battles meaning that even though the individual enemy isn’t too much to sweat, their grouping still allows these fights to still have some give and take.
The dinosaur variety helps these moments stay fresh as well. Raptors are essentially the generic enemy of the game, the foe you encounter most and the one that most explicitly relies on pack tactics to put up a fight. However, even other dinosaurs that rely on numbers have different approaches. Pteranodons fly above, proving to be a harder targets to aim at due to constant movement and only really getting close when they swoop in, and Oviraptors have been given the ability to spit venom at the player to perhaps give these egg-stealing carnivores the famous added poison powers of the Dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park without completely admitting the idea was lifted from the most famous piece of dinosaur media of all time. There are some interesting pulls when it comes to prehistoric beasts like the Inostrancevia being used as a mostly bullet-resistant foe whose weak spot you must expose, but then the more well-known Mosasaurus makes an appearance as well for an underwater segment that more closely hews to the horror roots of this series in that you are much less capable while in a clunky diving suit and wielding less effective weapons. The underwater section isn’t the only big shift in play either, with a few segments cropping up where you’re unloading turrets into the faces of Plesiosaurs or a Triceratops, but definitely the most bombastic has to be the battle with a one-eyed T-Rex (who, it should be noted, lost its eye when it took an RPG shot to the face in the opening cutscene) where you fight it while inside a tank and it somehow is able to keep moving after constant tank shell bombardment. Dino Crisis 2’s combat is almost too ridiculous at times to balk at, the game’s happy embrace of bringing heavy artillery to dinosaur fights making for an overall action packed adventure despite the game trying to work in puzzle elements as well such as trying to detain a small Compsognathus after it snatches an important key.
The story of Dino Crisis 2 can be a bit convoluted at times thanks to its time travel elements, but it mostly seems concerned with carrying you into new locations with new dinosaur fights, and it achieves that goal fairly well. Once you do wrap up the story though, you can unlock some extra modes, one essentially being a dinosaur fighting game that is definitely rough around the edges since it is an afterthought rather than something the game was built around. However, the colosseum battle mode focused on surviving waves of enemies sort of shows that without external motivations like the risk/reward balance of the Extinction Points system in the main game, the combat probably would be too much of a mindless power trip.
THE VERDICT: Dino Crisis 2 is certainly a different beast than the original game. Choosing to embrace fast-paced action over survival horror, Dino Crisis 2 tackles gunning down dinosaurs in a different yet exciting way. The fragility of the dinosaurs when up against your powerful arsenal is balanced out by their numbers and tactics, and thanks to the Extinction Points system encouraging constant battle with them, the potentially mindless combat manages instead ends up dangerous yet rewarding. The plot isn’t good for much besides carrying you into new battles, but the over the top dinosaur hunting gameplay is still a good fit for turning your mind off to revel in the action that isn’t dampened by the game’s occasional efforts to make you think with a puzzle here or there.
And so, I give Dino Crisis 2 for the PlayStation…
A GOOD rating. Genre shifts are a risky endeavor for a franchise, but Capcom seems to have known what they were doing, especially when it comes to the implementation of the Extinction Points system. The need to engage in combat so frequently is what molds the dinosaur encounters from simple one-sided affairs into ones where you do start facing more meaningful resistance, the number advantages and unique creatures featured able to leave a mark on you despite the game freely giving you the means to be a powerhouse. It’s a delicate balance, one that things like being able to buy health so easily could almost upset, but the point distribution mostly favors a gradual growth that is paced well with the progress through the plot. While very few moments break the mold of blasting dinosaurs as they try and swipe and snap at you, they shift around enough within that structure that, while it can’t offer anything too involved or tactical, still manages to achieve that simple thrill you’d hope to find in gunning down some of history’s greatest predators, and some deviations like the underwater segment do at least offer the shake-ups needs to prevent the game from feeling too similar throughout.
Dino Crisis 2 is very much a dinosaur hunting power fantasy, almost an exaggeration on the premise of The Lost World: Jurassic Park’s idea of prehistoric monsters running wild in modern settings. While whether or not there’s enough left from the first game’s DNA to classify it as a horror game is up for debate, it does manage to be approximately just as good despite approaching dinosaur hunting in a very different style.