Jurassic: The Hunted (Xbox 360)

While Jurassic Park certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on dinosaurs, it’s rather easy to tell when something is trying to ride its coattails. Since the Jurassic is an entire period of history it’s not like the biggest dinosaur brand around can prevent others from putting the word in their title, but Jurassic: The Hunted isn’t just a case of luring people in with possible brand confusion. Taking the fictitious elements of Jurassic Park’s interpretation of Dilophosaurus with a frill and poison spit is the most egregious, but with plentiful raptors and a Tyrannosaurus rex on the cover it is banking pretty hard on copying its inspiration’s most famous components, but it at least doesn’t cross into full rip-off territory despite the brazen similarities.

In Jurassic: The Hunted, researcher James Sayrus disappears during an expedition through the Bermuda Triangle. 28 years later his daughter Sabrina decides to try and investigate what happened after receiving strange signals from where he disappeared, bringing along with her former Navy SEALs Craig Dylan and Armando “Rock” Depiedra for protection. Before they can even reach land though they are sucked into an unusual storm that dumps them out onto an island where dinosaurs still roam, the player playing as Craig Dylan as he fights his way through the island with whatever firearms were also pulled by similar temporal storms to this island outside of time. The plot mostly feels present to explain what’s going on and why you need to head to certain dangerous parts of the island, and with a lack of subtitles it can sometimes be difficult to hear conversations over the very loud temporal storms that dump objects and dinosaurs into areas. The storms themselves do seem to glitch out at times and linger around after they should have disappeared, but few technical problems impact the gameplay which seems to be a tight and rather straightforward approach to gunplay.

Shooting is a fairly simple affair in Jurassic: The Hunted, to the point that aiming down sights for better accuracy isn’t even too important to success in this first-person shooter. Many of the dinosaurs you are up against are sufficiently large targets and you’re able to scrounge up some pretty powerful weapon options early on. The pistols you do begin with do definitely benefit from careful aim, especially since your ammo does start off limited, but your automatically recovering health eases that early difficulty and soon you’ll be finding assault rifles and shotguns that do a lot more damage to the hostile carnivorous wildlife that will constantly accost you. The lush foliage and lighting of the tropical island as well as entry points from cliff faces above do give the dinosaurs ways to actually get the drop on you, and while you can carry up to four weapons at the time, the ammo distribution means that at many parts you’ll likely be trying to preserve the good stuff while needing to balance the strength of what you are using currently so you aren’t boxed in by too many creatures at once. It’s mostly a simple shooting system although you can activate Adrenaline Bursts for short periods to slow things down and see the organs and other weak spots of nearby dinosaurs to better target them for quicker kills. Some weapons like the Black Powder Rifle are so slow and comparatively weak that you won’t even want to use it for its intended sniper sections when long range assault rifle shots works just as well while something like the Light Machine Gun’s long loading animation may mean you swap it for something swifter if not as strong, but the decisions often aren’t too deep since the opposition is mostly cut from the same cloth throughout.

Jurassic: The Hunted has a bit of a raptor problem, in that they’re pretty much all you fight beyond a brief stint where giant scorpions become a bit more common. Surprisingly though the Velociraptors of Jurassic Park form are presented in a more accurate smaller form more typical of Compsognathuses in fiction, these little raptors relying on large groups and speedy movements despite being easy to put down once you land a good shot on them. The Deinonychus raptors are the more standard enemy type though, fairly durable and dangerous but such a constant presence that they start to feel a bit more like fodder unless they have sufficient numbers or back up. The large Utahraptor at least towers over you and is a speedy and durable danger when it crops up, but then you’ll likely be going back to Deinonychuses for quite a while before it introduces something new. The poison spitting Dilophosauruses at least introduce a long range threat and while pterosaurs are usually harmless set dressing, there are devoted segments where they swoop down to strike in little flocks. Some environmental variety helps as well like crossing through the top of a volcano where falling into lava is a real threat as you dodge Dilophosaurus spit and the pterosaur roosts are filled with so many of the flying creatures that you’d burn a lot of ammo if you tried to clear them out rather than seeing which ones are actually aggressive. While fights can certainly feel a little uninspired when it is just jungle Deinonychus groups presented yet again, shake-ups like bringing in the scorpion caves happen enough it staves off repetition to remain somewhat entertaining.

Boss fights are a strange bunch though, partly because the only time you encounter the Tyrannosaurus rex on the cover in battle is in a turret section where the pteranodon back-up are probably more dangerous than the tyrant lizard king. The two T-rexes fought are both behind the infinite ammo turret where overheating it is the only concern but the bullets discourage the charging giants with too much ease, taking some wind out of the sails for these encounters. The Spinosaurus is a more interesting beast, earning the nickname Spike and presented as far more dangerous than those T-rexes not only with a cutscene of dominance asserting but in how you fight Spike. Being on the ground as the creature can actually snap its jaws at you or even lift you up makes it a more exciting and dangerous fight in premise and a rematch later seems to have some solid stakes despite not being quite so immediately dangerous. It is a bit of a shame the game had rendered models for other dinosaurs like Triceratops and Pachycephalosauruses that show up in the world but never crop up in fights, but while the boss fights do break from raptor shooting some, the more interesting moments actually use more raptors than any other part of the game.

At certain points you’ll find yourself near some improvised fortifications needing to defend your position until all the incoming raptors are dealt with. The large log walls do limit the free movement that makes the basic fighting still somewhat interesting, but the windows that can serve as points of entry are poorly barricaded and you need to spend time maintaining them and shooting at the raptors outside through them to ensure you don’t get surrounded in the small interior area. Keeping active and managing the window repairs is made a bit simpler by an ammo box that provides refills for free, although even breaking away to restock when you aren’t between waves can lead to a window being worn down rather quickly. Here the layout of the little forts provides the needed variety even if the enemies are all of the same type and it’s actually a bit exciting to see these segments crop up as you know you’ll be in for a more unique, intense, and demanding fight than usual. While the game tries to do something similar with turret sections, those guns are too strong and holding back a wave of scorpions by pointing and shooting at them is not as interactive.

The fort survival mode actually appears in a separate mode beyond the story. There is no multiplayer to be had so once you complete the short campaign the longevity is mostly found in Survival Mode’s expansion of the defense segments. In Survival Mode you start with only the pistol and waves of raptors will come and assault a large wall you need to keep defended and fortified. With each wave cleared you’ll earn a new weapon and shooting albino Velociraptors when they pop up will earn you grenades, but if you managed to find enough parts in the story mode you can earn the mounted guns that make holding back the huge waves of incoming dinosaurs much more manageable. As you gradually climb in power by surviving each wave though the raptors become tougher, more abundant, and Utahraptors start joining their forces, and since the windows are far apart and the time between waves shrinks, it becomes harder to maintain your fortifications. Admittedly it does take a bit to get challenging and repeating the mode does mean playing through the tamer early waves again but it does put up a fight once it gets going while testing your threat management skills much harder than the already decent fort segments from the story.

THE VERDICT: If all you want is the thrill of shooting your way through scores of dinosaurs, Jurassic: The Hunted provides a simple and unambitious way of doing so. Admittedly you’ll spend a lot of the time against raptors and scorpions specifically, but some variation is thrown in often enough that it lasts the story’s short run time and moments like the fort defenses are interesting because of their structure rather than what creature happens to be coming at you. It is a shame big battles like the T-rex fights aren’t very exciting and the plot only exists to tell you why you’re using modern firearms on prehistoric creatures, but the straightforward first-person shooting action maintains a level of mild enjoyability without too many notable faults to weigh it down.

And so, I give Jurassic: The Hunted for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. More dinosaur variation would definitely have helped this game shake off its small moments of stagnation, and the earlier mentioned Triceratops and Pachycephalosauruses might have been intended to do so before they were just left in as snacks for raptors or as a herd of creatures running past. Some load screens even show concept art of creatures that don’t appear in game so it is possible the game wasn’t given the time or budget to expand its offerings, but some recontextualization of the shooting like the fort defense moments do a good deal in helping the game avoid being too basic or repetitive. Roping in the occasional moments of variance like the pterosaur roost or the shift to scorpions for a fair bit also give you something new that moves in a different manner, scorpions crawling on walls and pterosaurs swooping down while the raptors being on eye level with you can otherwise make the shooting a bit simple at times. There’s a light sprinkling of the other dinosaur types to prevent this from being a Deinonychus parade and the weapons are spaced well enough that you are thinking about what you’re using and feeling the limits of your choices at times, so while it’s not really excelling at many points it still keeps you moving forward and somewhat engaged rather than mindlessly mowing down extinct animals. Adrenaline Bursts could have been a more interesting mechanic if they were more useful, but having each dinosaur have points beyond their head worth targeting also makes fighting them a bit more layered than blasting them wherever you can hit them while still preventing the game from dragging since hitting organs isn’t outright necessary for success.

Jurassic: The Hunted deliberately invited some comparisons to Jurassic Park with quite a few of its choices, but elements like the fort survival do mean it has some concepts of its own to make it a little more than a knock off. More could have been done with the time-crossing storms of the Bermuda Triangle to spice things up, but Jurassic: The Hunted probably just wanted to be a competent dinosaur shooter and it did achieve that much. It may not really impress with any of its ideas and it’s not so much about dinosaur hunting as it is defending yourself against whatever pops out of the jungle to kill you, but you could certainly do worse than this raptor-heavy experience.