Dino Crisis Playthrough (Part 1)

In December 2020 a thread popped up on VGS, challenging would-be participants to list out some games they wanted to play through in 2021. We'd all make a list of games we thought we could reasonably expect ourselves to get through in the year, try to do so, then at year's end see how we did.

I made my list with, as many do, the best of intentions - I sincerely wanted to make a decent attempt at each of the games! Work may have gotten in the way a few times, as well as a slight addiction to a certain MMO that I've recently decided to go cold turkey on.

Having dropped the MMO, I can now focus my efforts on my backlog, and I decided (with some prompting) to play through Dino Crisis. I've not played it before, but being a fan of the old Resident Evil games it seemed it'd be right up my alley. So far it looks like I was right - the game is pretty similar, though perhaps a bit more action-oriented. The dinosaurs are fast-moving and so far primarily velociraptors, though more recently I've run into some compsognathus, the tiny devils. The game gives two difficulty options from the outset - Normal (the default) and Easy; I'm playing on Normal.

Something I've not seen the end-result of yet but which I find very interesting is that I've been given a choice already on what action to take - literally the game presented two options, one to support the mission-minded leader of my team and the other to answer a distress call along with my more emotion-driven and well-meaning cohort. I went with the team leader, potentially the "bad" route, but time will tell. I don't know that the game necessarily has good/bad so much as simply choices with outcomes; I'm excited to find out!

I'm a couple of hours in and the puzzles aren't difficult at all, and the traditional RE-style map is helpful in finding my bearings and keeping me on track. So far I've been avoiding confrontations with the dinosaurs as best I can to conserve ammo and healing items, though it has so far lead to an abundance of both. I've crafted a few instant-kill bullets and very useful anesthetic rounds for whenever I might actually need them. Perhaps in my next play session I'll have more need for the bullets I've created.