Another Breed of Aliens

Originally, the third mainline entry in the Dino Crisis series was supposed to take place in a near-future post-apocalypse and star characters from the first two games.  Basically, it was going to be a zombie survival horror title except with dinosaurs instead of the walking dead.  However, the (then) recent 9/11 terrorist attacks, plus lackluster performance of Jurassic Park III at the boxoffice, convinced Capcom to change course early on in development.  So, instead of a logical follow-up to Dino Crisis 2, we got a far-flung futuristic setting wherein the player is tasked with investigating a seemingly derelict spacecraft orbiting Jupiter...which as one might guess happens to be infested with not just dinosaurs, but mutant dinosaurs.

Dino Crisis from its inception, and especially in the second game, had a lot in common with Aliens in terms of plot and pacing.  Dino Crisis 3 in particular though feels like Capcom was milking the movie franchise for every last usable idea.  Not only is it set in an industrialized outer space environment, but the dinosaurs themselves are skinless monstrosities that only feel vaguely reminiscent of their real-world counterparts.  Of course, the surprise in-game twist is that these creatures are actually a combination of human and dino DNA and the result of the derelict ship AI going off the rails after the entire crew died of radiation exposure.

Gameplay-wise Dino Crisis 3 is a third-person shooter.  Unlike the previous entry in the series, it forgoes pre-rendered backgrounds in lieu of 3D assets generated in real-time (much like the original).  On paper this sounds like a good thing and yet for Dino Crisis 3 it ends up being the worst of both worlds.  One of the advantages of pre-rendered environments is the increased level of detail that can be accomplished even on relatively lackluster hardware.  The trade off is a camera that has to stick to fixed angles, often leading to poor PoV shots for whatever it is the player is trying to accomplish.  Dino Crisis 3 somehow manages to have a terrible camera that is constantly not facing where they player needs to see, while simultaneously utilizing dull-looking, metallic rooms with little to no set dressing.  It doesn't really make sense from a design perspective, both in and out of the fiction.  Why did the developers not provide decent camera controls?  Isn't that the big advantage of not using pre-rendered backgrounds?  Additionally, the spaceship in which the entire game takes place on is designed to support and sustain a large number of people and yet there don't seem to be any crew quarters...or a recreation center...or a medical bay.  An oxygen garden of some kind would make a lot of sense as well.  Of course, the real reason these things aren't present is because original Xbox hardware wouldn't have been able to handle that kind of polygon count.  So, instead players are left to explore lots of relatively empty cargo bays.  To alleviate some of the blandness the development team did try to add some variety by having modularity built into the ship design.  Players can reconfigure the layout and orientation of some parts of the ship in order to solve puzzles and advance the story.  Again not a bad idea on paper, but this approach leads to a lot of tedious backtracking and annoying platforming both of which are aggravated by special encounter rooms that require the player to fight off wave after wave of mutant dinosaurs ad nauseum.

The story is a drip feed of bad voice acting.  That alone wouldn't be all that bad if the protagonist wasn't such a thoroughly unlikable dunce who is overshadowed by the secondary characters at every turn.  As I mentioned earlier, think poor-man's knockoff of Aliens and you're ninety percent of the way there.  If you want the whole rundown of similarities, a Youtube channel by the name of RedScotGaming has a very thorough breakdown of the entire franchise here.  Since it's over an hour long though, here's a select list of similar plot points for those who don't have the spare time:

• Botched mission
• Secret artificial human
• Ship AI is called "MTHR"
• Heroic sacrifice involving a hand grenade
• Self-destruct sequence    
• Surprise 4th act showdown

...and of course there's the simple fact that the player is trapped in a space sci-fi location shooting lots of hideous monsters with a machine gun...a quintessential survival horror premise that was sadly not at it's finest here.  Then again, the same thing can be said of for much of the Aliens IP, official or derived.  Oh well...at least the mutant dinosaurs looked kind of cool.