Before I back my car up over this game, I just want to take a moment to praise Regina's design. We all love Regina, she's one of the best survival horror protagonists and I would die for her. Unfortunately, I don't love her enough to play through Dino Crisis again.
Conceptually, Dino Crisis sounds amazing. A survival horror game by Shinji Mikami set in a research facility overrun by reanimated super dinos? How could you possibly screw that up? Capcom uh, finds a way. Despite having such an insane premise, Dino Crisis is a flaccid, dull, and agonizingly sterile game with little wit or humor, and is bar none the low point of Capcom's 5th gen survival horror golden age.
One of the most critical elements of a survival horror game are its puzzles. How they're paced, how you meter out action between problem solving, the rhythm of progressing through them... This is something Resident Evil nails. You learn the layout of the Spencer Mansion through solving its many puzzles, and in the late game they are carefully designed to lead you through familiar locations that have become repopulated with more fearsome enemies, which keeps you on your toes. Dino Crisis, however, never manages to establish a good sense of flow with its puzzles and fails at familiarizing you with the sanitized corridores of Ibis Island. Scrub through a full playthrough of the game on YouTube and you'll probably see a lot of tapping at computer screens and moving boxes around awkwardly with a crane. You know what you won't see much of? Dinosaurs! Enemy encounters are few and far between, and while this does make them pretty tense when you do come face-to-face with one, it also means large swathes of the game are spent running back and forth between vacant hallways and quiet rooms. I don't know how you make a game called Dino Crisis, ostensibly about a crisis of dinosaurs, and you forget to put dinos in it.
That's not to say you don't shoot at anything during the course of the game, but it's hardly on par with the number of enemies you encounter in Resident Evil, both in terms of sheer quantity and variety. Dino Crisis is at its most stressful when you're thumbing through your rolodex of key cards hoping you have the second half of a set, else you'll be participating in another mind-numbing puzzle. I wonder how much of this was a lack of foresight on Capcom's part. If you're going to place your protagonist inside enclosed environments then there's really only so many kinds of dinosaurs you can use as enemies, and it mostly shakes out that you'll be shooting at raptors and occasionally a T-rex (though those do make for some fun set pieces.)
Dino Crisis isn't just a boring game, it's an icon of wasted potential, and I want to see that potential realized. Maybe Capcom fears what would happen if they unleashed Regina's thighs in 4k, but it's more likely that Dino Crisis hasn't gotten the RE Engine treatment due to a lack of perceived profitability. Sadly, it makes sense. From a business perspective, there's less incentive to remake a game that badly needs a second pass when there's more money to be had remaking a game that's already popular. Resident Evil 4 is a great game, you can play it on literally anything, it doesn't need a remake. But you also don't need a cretin like Michael Pachter to run the numbers and tell you REmake 4 would be more profitable than a new Dino Crisis. Regina deserves better than this.
Conceptually, Dino Crisis sounds amazing. A survival horror game by Shinji Mikami set in a research facility overrun by reanimated super dinos? How could you possibly screw that up? Capcom uh, finds a way. Despite having such an insane premise, Dino Crisis is a flaccid, dull, and agonizingly sterile game with little wit or humor, and is bar none the low point of Capcom's 5th gen survival horror golden age.
One of the most critical elements of a survival horror game are its puzzles. How they're paced, how you meter out action between problem solving, the rhythm of progressing through them... This is something Resident Evil nails. You learn the layout of the Spencer Mansion through solving its many puzzles, and in the late game they are carefully designed to lead you through familiar locations that have become repopulated with more fearsome enemies, which keeps you on your toes. Dino Crisis, however, never manages to establish a good sense of flow with its puzzles and fails at familiarizing you with the sanitized corridores of Ibis Island. Scrub through a full playthrough of the game on YouTube and you'll probably see a lot of tapping at computer screens and moving boxes around awkwardly with a crane. You know what you won't see much of? Dinosaurs! Enemy encounters are few and far between, and while this does make them pretty tense when you do come face-to-face with one, it also means large swathes of the game are spent running back and forth between vacant hallways and quiet rooms. I don't know how you make a game called Dino Crisis, ostensibly about a crisis of dinosaurs, and you forget to put dinos in it.
That's not to say you don't shoot at anything during the course of the game, but it's hardly on par with the number of enemies you encounter in Resident Evil, both in terms of sheer quantity and variety. Dino Crisis is at its most stressful when you're thumbing through your rolodex of key cards hoping you have the second half of a set, else you'll be participating in another mind-numbing puzzle. I wonder how much of this was a lack of foresight on Capcom's part. If you're going to place your protagonist inside enclosed environments then there's really only so many kinds of dinosaurs you can use as enemies, and it mostly shakes out that you'll be shooting at raptors and occasionally a T-rex (though those do make for some fun set pieces.)
Dino Crisis isn't just a boring game, it's an icon of wasted potential, and I want to see that potential realized. Maybe Capcom fears what would happen if they unleashed Regina's thighs in 4k, but it's more likely that Dino Crisis hasn't gotten the RE Engine treatment due to a lack of perceived profitability. Sadly, it makes sense. From a business perspective, there's less incentive to remake a game that badly needs a second pass when there's more money to be had remaking a game that's already popular. Resident Evil 4 is a great game, you can play it on literally anything, it doesn't need a remake. But you also don't need a cretin like Michael Pachter to run the numbers and tell you REmake 4 would be more profitable than a new Dino Crisis. Regina deserves better than this.