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Capcom enjoyed great success with their Resident Evil series, creating a new genre in video gaming. The `survival horror' genre blends a puzzle game with action and some great scares. There can only be so many zombie games, and Capcom obviously wanted to keep the game engine, so they sat down at their design meetings and came up with Dino Crisis.

I can imagine how these meetings must have gone. They wanted to make another Resident Evil game with a different enemy. But which enemy to choose? They would have to buy a license to make a game using a creature from a movie or story, and if they made up their own new monster it probably wouldn't have a strong impact. Then they realize the key to it all: Jurassic Park was kind of scary, and nobody owns the rights to dinosaurs!

The resulting product is one that strains even the most powerful of suspensions of disbelief, featuring a special ops team so incompetent that the United States military will be rolling with laughter into the next century after playing this game.

The game opens with a FMV movie of your team parachuting out of a helicopter, which nobody ever does. One of your teammates, who got separated from the group is immediately eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This sets the scene for the game.

The next thing we see is the commanding officer giving orders to the group. He notices that something is wrong, yet he recommends that everyone split up. Finally, you gain control of your character, Regina, who is the most poorly armed member of the group. While the commander gets a machine gun and the security expert wields a large rifle, Regina, whose exact purpose in the group is unknown, has only a 9 mm handgun to defend herself with.

The gameplay in Dino Crisis is exactly the same as in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2. You control Regina in the 3D environment, and can walk, run, and aim (and fire) your gun. The puzzles in Dino Crisis run from easy to extremely hard as you progress through the game. The types of puzzles can be roughly broken up into a couple categories.

The first category is the push-buttons-in-the-right-order category. A lot of the later versions of this type rely as much on trial and error as they do logic.

The second category is the find-key-cards-and-a-password-number type. These can be really annoying as the password can come from almost anywhere.

The third type is the figure-out-the-word-puzzle type. The puzzles themselves are fine, but they are used in the security system, which makes them seem absurd.

It's clear that Dino Crisis takes place in some kind of alternate universe. When you examine the toilets in the bathroom, you find that they are "well maintained and cleaned," and in the hallways you will find "A vending machine for nutritional drinks."

The scares in Dino Crisis are all of the "BOO!" type. The tension is constantly held by the music and occasional atmospheric sounds, or the complete lack of them. Then all of a sudden, crash! A dinosaur jumps at you from somewhere. There's a brief moment of fright and then I simply wasn't scared anymore. I was in combat with a big lizard, which I killed. Dinosaurs just aren't scary the way zombies are. In the Resident Evil games, a zombie would come crashing at you, then come lumbering at you, moaning, and it was scary even after it was dead! Not so in Dino Crisis.

Capcom continues to give kids the wrong impression about drugs in Dino Crisis. In the Resident Evil games, the healing items were herbs that you mixed together to make better herbs. In Dino Crisis we have graduated from herbs and have moved onto processed drugs that can be mixed for amazing body altering effects.

One thing I must say I like about the gameplay is that certain events are random. These are all cases of a dinosaur jumping out at you, but their randomness adds a lot of surprise to the big moment when they leap out and attack you.

The dinosaurs do a good job of killing you. In addition, a lot of the puzzles are difficult to complete and will take a long time. I doubt you would play through the game more than once, though, unless you're a diehard fan.

I never liked the controls in the Resident Evil games, but I was able to get beyond them because the games were so excellent. Well, the controls are back in Dino Crisis, but the excellent gameplay isn't. The turning rate is still extremely slow, and the controls in general are very slow to react to your input.

Plus, someone has to teach Regina how to shoot a gun. I have never seen someone fire a handgun as slowly as Regina does. Bang! Wait a second so that the bullet casing can clink against the floor. Bang! Wait some more. If she shoots like this when she's in danger, I'd hate to see her on the practice range. It would take her all day to empty a clip.

The graphics are one area where Dino Crisis excels. Instead of using pre-rendered backgrounds as the Resident Evil games did, everything is 3D in Dino Crisis. The characters have an amazingly high polygon count and beautiful, high resolution texturing. All this, and the frame rate is fantastic! The dark areas aren't so dark as to be impossible to see in, and the animation of everything is well done.

The unfortunate aspect of the graphics is that a lot of the difficult dinosaur killing situations are hard because of horrible camera angles. For example, there are several rooms where a dinosaur is just ten feet away, but you can't see it because you're looking at Regina. If you saw the world from Regina's point of view, you would have a clear and easy to aim shot at the big green lizard. As it is, you usually have to wait until it has practically jumped on you before you can even see to aim at it. The Resident Evil games also did this, but they weren't as bad, and their zombies weren't nearly as fast as the dinosaurs are.

The sound effects and music in Dino Crisis are very effective. The music creates an amazing sense of tension that, while used perhaps a little too much, does add a lot to the atmosphere of the game. Equally as effective is the absence of music in certain places. When all you hear is your echoing footstep or perhaps the clank of metal flooring beneath your feet, the fear aspect really hits home and you wonder if something is going to jump at you in real life.

The voice acting. Well, I'd prefer not to talk about the voice acting because it was really bad. It wasn't all the fault of the actors. The characters are shallow and the script was very badly written. The characters act like they're playing some kind of team sport, not like they're commandos out to perform a mission. I guess the idea was to create some kind of stressed team dynamics, but it came off as being really dorky. It's true that the same can be said for Resident Evil, but that almost makes it worse. You would think they would learn from their mistakes.

I know there are plenty of people who love this game. If you're a really big fan of the genre, then you will probably love it, too. Of course, you probably would have already purchased it and played through it twice by the time you read this review.

If you're not such a fan, then you may not enjoy Dino Crisis. I really liked the Resident Evil games, but a lot of that was due to the fact that they were truly frightening. I never liked the controls, but I was able to get past that because the game made me wet my pants.

Zombified humans are scary. Dinosaurs really aren't. At least, they're not scary to me. In this case I think they should have kept the game exactly the same, but shelled out the cash for the Aliens license. Now that would have been a scary game. No commandos, no futuristic anything. Just aliens invading a top secret research facility.

I would have to list Dino Crisis as a renter. If you really want it after that, buy it, but it just didn't hit me the way the Resident Evil games did.