Dino Stalker Preview
Read all about Capcom's upcoming Dino Crisis offshoot light-gun game.
The Gun Survivor series hasn't exactly been a fan favorite, but it's safe to say that each subsequent installment refines the series just a little bit. Dino Stalker is the third game in the line, and just as its predecessors were set in the Resident Evil universe, it takes place in a lizard-laden world highly reminiscent of what we saw in the Dino Crisis series. Also like its predecessors, it blends the cinematic pacing of Capcom's survival horror series with a fairly liberating take on the light-gun game. You're able to move about freely as you would in a first-person shooter, but a scripted camera wholly dictates your field of vision. Instead of moving the camera around, you actually move your targeting reticle around the screen, which allows you to aim anywhere in your current field of vision. The game supports Namco's GunCon 2 peripheral, and when you use it to play, you can control both your character and your targeting reticle through it entirely. The D pad built into the peripheral's thumb area lets you move your character, and you aim by moving the gun itself. All auxiliary functions are mapped to the appropriate spots on the GunCon 2 as well, including weapon switching and sidestepping. Alternately, you can play the game with a standard PlayStation 2 controller, though with a bit less precision.
Dino Stalker is quite an interesting mix in terms of how its game mechanics work. Though you can roam its environments freely, you're still under a timer, albeit a very generous one. While you're given a generous amount of time to go through each level to begin with, you'll find crystals scattered around the world that, upon contact with your body or one of your rounds of ammunition, will net you a few seconds of playtime. Because these are placed frequently along the game's "trails," you'll find that you'll seldom want for time. You're encouraged to explore, and the game's levels seem designed for just that. The quickest paths from the beginning to the end of each level are pretty solidly marked--you'll see an actual trail, or you can simply follow the arrows on your in-game radar--but there are often a good number of diversions to be found. A few levels are "on rails," but there's always an in-game justification for it. An early stage, for instance, has you as a passenger on a barge, whose course leads from the mouth of a rock river into a set of tunnels. Your path is pretty much set throughout this sequence and those like it, but given the fact that those preceding and following it are free roaming, it feels more like an exciting distraction than a glaring abstraction of movement.
The stages we've seen thus far are nicely detailed and excitingly paced. Though your initial forays into its world are fairly Paleolithic, you'll find that things take a turn for the frighteningly modern as you progress through the game. Traces of modern technology start to appear gradually, first manifesting as ominous, ambiguous images--like a Statue of Liberty buried in a postnuclear desert--then as settings more bizarre and solemnly concrete. The game's story was conceived by Flagship, the script house responsible for writing the Resident Evil series' storylines, so, without providing too much of a spoiler, you should expect something along those lines.
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- GameSpot Score4.6poor
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Dino Stalker Movie 6
Here is the intro movie for Dino Stalker.
- Sep 27, 2002
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