Horror Games Special Feature – Dino Crisis 3

Posted on 27th October 2015 by

With Halloween just around the corner, we felt it was time to delve into some of the horror classics of gaming!
In the nights leading up to All Hallows Eve, we’re going to do a short feature of some of the more notable horror games that have been released. This isn’t a list of the best or even our favourites.
Just some Horror games which have stood out to us, for one reason or another.

You know how they say, for every good horror movie, there are about a hundred awful ones?
This is something that, thankfully, doesn’t apply to survival horror games. It’s a pretty balanced mix between good and bad.
But when they’re bad…they are really, really bad.
Case in point: Dino Crisis 3

It’s worth noting that Dino Crisis 3 isn’t the worst horror game we’ve ever played, it’s just the most ridiculous. Fans of the original might remember the “Jurassic Park meets Resident Evil” style of gameplay, with vicious dinosaurs taking the place of lumbering zombies in a research facility on Monster Island*.
*(Not a real island)

The sequel was very much a cut and paste job (albeit with an even more ridiculous story). Then Dino Crisis 3 decided to go from ridiculous to outright insane. How do you make a game featuring dinosaurs and time-travel even more insane you ask? Simple.
Set it in the future and in space. That’s right.
Dino Crisis is a survival horror game in which you fight dinosaurs in space. That is what this game is about.

It isn’t just the premise that makes it bad, of course. A certain argument could be made that a wacky premise like that could make it brilliant. But it was held back by a truly awful camera that you would constantly fumble with. That’s the downside.
The upside? You also get a jet pack. That’s right.
You fight a bunch of dinosaurs in space, with a jet pack.

If nothing else, Dino Crisis 3 deserves to be on this list for having the guts to be ridiculous. While the execution is often as important, if not more so than the premise of a game, it’s nice to see one developer branching out towards such a fantastic concept.

Best moment
It sucks that this isn’t a playable set piece, but the T-rex intro is still a pretty badass scene in the game.

Where is the franchise now?
A Dino Crisis reboot was announced in 2014, with more details supposed to be revealed at the Tokyo Game Show 2014. Strangely, this never came about, and the status of the reboot seems very much up in the air. Cancelled? Delayed? Just keeping quiet? Who knows?