Dino Crisis 3

[Tombor]

Dino Crisis 3 get... Thursday god willing. If anyone interested I'll try to post impressions.

[Dyne]

It's already here? I should give it a rent.

[Tombor]

Nah... I'm getting the import. Full English cooler box art and I modded my Xbox to play SOMETHING Japanese....

Its out here August 5th. The same day as Chaos Legion. That's the other reason... I want to play that really bad too.

[Dyne]

Ah, that explains it. Meh, a month or so..

Judging by the screens, it looks kickass. I'm glad there's something good on Xbox during the summer.

[Tombor]

I spent the whole weekend with it and beat it. I have to say I liked it and am reasonably impressed. The game is pretty short and keeps threatening to end earlier then it does (there's a lot of weird plotting). The story is pretty much throw away and borderline unintentionally hilarious... nothing as bad as MGS2's or DMC 2's moments playing as Lucia (especially near the end) but pretty blah. The voice acting is pretty competent and is in English.

The game plays a like a mix of Devil May Cry, Onimusha, and even a bit of Product Number 03 with all the backtracking, keycards and puzzle solving of the other Dino Crisis games. With a jet pack.

Action is much like Devil May Cry as is the control. Enemies are plentiful and consist of wormy dinosaurs, these strange hammerhead looking guys, and gorilla like dinosaurs. The plot has something to do with an evil spacehip splicing dinosaur DNA with other animal DNA. There are also Devil May Cry-style boss battles involving some giant dinosaurs and such.

The Onimusha element is pretty minute: you have a "TC" meter that gradually fills as you kill more and more dinos ("Eliminate") and you empty the meter and use TC points at save points to buy weapons, items, and to increase you health, jetpack, or TC meter capacity. Product Number 03's combo system and point system is lifted and blended with the TC meter for this game.

The jetpack is by far the coolest thing about this game and certainly helps keep things interesting. The B button causes you to jump the R trigger dashes and you hold the R trigger for safe landing or thrusts in midair. The jetpack encourages exploration in multitiered environments, increased maneuvrability when fighting dino hordes and brief explorations outside of the ship and in zero gravity. The zero gravity stuff doesn't come off to great though...

The game looks pretty slick. The environments are shiney and elaborate, sporting some very cool light sourcing and shadows that keep just out of the reach of an equally sharp PS2 port. The enemies look menacing if a bit simplistic and your character looks pretty good. Overall pretty slick looking. The CG is superb and there's a LOT of it, the game never runs cutscenes in-game its entirely CG, but it suffers from lousy 3DO-like compression.

Overall worth a shot. I liked it better then Devil May Cry 2 and Product Number 03 (which I liked more then DMC 2) but I think I still like the Onimusha stuff the best. The import is mostly in English with the map and keys and "files" you find as you progress in Japanese. Its all really easy to figure out, though, and you'll never feel too lost except for the points in the game were the design team seemingly wanted you to feel lost... Worth a go.

[Jonbo298]

Sounds good. I'm not a fan of a game with all or nearly all CG cut scenes. I prefer real time because it seems more "real" to the game IMO.