This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Walking into Gamestop, I picked up this game for $14. I was less than impressed with the box art. However, I have been wrong on games before with a first look, i.e. The Last Remnant, Fallout New Vegas, etc. After only my first 15 minutes playing, I realized that this game has a bevy of problems.
Foremost, the controls are atrocious. I cannot speak for everyone else, but whilst playing this on the Xbox 360 I keep encountering a half-second input delay. Now normally, this wouldn't be TOO terrible for a First Person Shooter, but when you're trying to aim at fast and sometimes smaller enemies, this delay can mean life or death. The aiming is terrible unless you’re using the crossbow, grenades or RPG. And even worse, this game comes standard with framerate issues and frame tears whilst you’re in combat!
The enemies come in one of three ways: crazily blitz the character, spit projectiles, or be a turret section encounter (The T-Rex). The one proven strategy to beating this game is "Mow 'em down with my machine gun!!!!", there's no way to take advantage of the environment, no stealth element to avoid possible encounters with enemies (which could've added quite a bit of depth), and annoyingly there's no stats for the guns you do pick up, even though there are about 8 or so to choose from.
There's clearly not much effort put into the textures of the enemies, the environment (which is so bland I found myself getting lost quite a bit), and even our protagonist appears to be a robot dressed in military attire as there's nothing distinguishing about him or his personality, even in the few cutscenes you do get to see him.
I haven’t mentioned much of the story, cause there IS NO STORY!! It’s literally explained in one whole cutscene and the game is over before you even know it. Not that we’d care about our protagonist as he’s just the typical mercenary out for his check, and the rest of our cast isn’t any more interesting. The end-boss battle is laughable and the ending is just offensively disappointing, as if you’d REALLY want to play this game a second time.
All of that I can understand, as no game is perfect, with the exception of Fallout 3. HOWEVER, what ultimately put the nail in the coffin for me was the underwhelming sound real estate. When your character jumps, there is no landing sound effect. Most of the sound bytes are easily recognizable from much earlier games and some are even generic stock. In some areas, the audio doesn't even try to sync with the video, which completely sucked me out of the game.
All in all, this game was “okay” for such a low price. However, looking at this game as a whole, it was a shameless cash-in to capitalize on the mostly entertaining dinosaur genre. The effort put into this game is more or less “Eh, everyone else has done it, so why not us?” instead of creating something that actually could have been halfway decent.… Expand