Dino Crisis 2

I love this game, it holds so many memories. I was probably only 11 or 12 years old and my grandparents for some reason had this game, I think my aunt gave it to them for me to play when I visited. So I'd play this when I came over for parties, although I never could get very far because we'd only stay for a few hours at most. Then a few years after that my grandparents ended up giving us their old computer when they got a new one and gave me this game with it. So I would be glued to this game in the backroom of my house pretty often when I was like 13 years old. I probably beat this game a number of times, played the hell out of the unlockable arena mode. I learned the best strategy on my own, which was basically spamming the energy gun at all dinosaurs which stuns them and kills them fairly fast, and I remember every segment of this game, every boss fight, every dinosaur in this. It brings back so many memories of being on our first computer and playing this.

Its a very different game than the first, this is an action game where dinosaurs will often fight you in groups and you are given tons of ammo and weapons and you get points for killing dinos like an arcade which you can use to by more weapons and healing. Unlike the first game you can take a bit more of a beating in this and you are expected to play this like an action game. Now this is fine because lets be honest, dinosaurs are not that scary, I mean in real life they are, but in games they aren't as frighting as the monsters in Resident Evil or Silent Hill, and in the first game there were often times the dinosaurs would move awkward and it'd be easy to flank them, so adding more dinos made this game more tense and exciting than the first. The story in this is about the same as the first more generic time travel crap, except in this you play as 2 characters similar to what Code Veronica did. There are more dinosaurs in this, a bigger variety of locations, more weapons, more unlockables. The arena where you get to play as the dinosaurs after beating the game is kind of fun, even if it gets repetitive. For me this was way more memorable than the first and does more good things than bad. Yeah it does have frustrating moments and some gimmick things like driving a tank and on rail segments. Plus the underwater segment of this game is a bit odd feeling and almost feels forced into the game (although nostalgia does allow me to sort of like the segment even if I know its badly designed and controls bad). Either way this is probably up their with Turok 2 as the best dinosaur based game of all time. Seriously if Capcom just got back to make another Dino Crisis game in the same vein as this as well as not mess up the Resident Evil 2 remake I might actually forgive them for the past 10 years of mediocre garbage and horrible business decisions they've made.

Dino Crisis 2 has a character swapping framework that makes no sense, a railroaded pace that pretends to give you freedom but instead just encourages backtracking, and a ton of dalliances with other types of gameplay that dilute the experience in the short playtime of the game enough to make it feel like a throwaway side story, made in the dying years of the PS1 era. Which is a shame, as the basic gunplay is actually quite good, with an inspired weapon upgrade and combo system that encourages efficient play and mostly feels good in your hands. A guilty pleasure that feels both one of a kind and like the kind of game I've seen a million times.