EA Goes on the Warpath

EA will soon officially announce the release of Warpath: Jurassic Park for the PlayStation from developer DreamWorks Interactive shortly, but on Monday GameSpot News got an early look at the game, complete with exclusive screenshots.

The game is a fighter - a dinosaur fighter. You play a dinosaur, your buddy plays a dinosaur, and the two of you go at it, at least in vs. mode. There are a number of modes: practice (where the moves and their amount of damage are shown and practiced), arcade, vs., survival, team, rage, and museum (where you can learn some things). Rage mode is unique in that when you attain a certain level of "rage" (from taunts or hits), you're prowess will be increased - you'll be more vulnerable, but you'll also be faster.

You've got 14 dinosaurs to choose from - some carnivores, some herbivores, but all designed to be fierce and savage. According to the developers, dinosaur authenticity was of paramount importance - all the dinos in the game are based on real fossils. Not all have appeared in Jurassic Park movies, but they do all exist, including one recently discovered in Morocco (Suchomimus). T-Rexes, raptors, compys, triceratops, and giantosaurus are among those included, and others are hidden and will have to be unlocked. But some level of "poetic license" has been taken - herbivores wouldn't be nasty enough to T-Rexes, otherwise. (They would just turn tail and run, truth to tell). So while there's a good deal of realism in the creation of the dinosaurs, a number of fighting moves and killer instincts have been added to various creatures for the sake of gameplay.

The arenas are all from the two Jurassic Park movies: the 76 gas station, the embryo lab, helipad, raptor pen, foyer, hunter camp, T-Rex paddock, Site B, tribal gate, freight dock, and others will all have to be unlocked. All the arenas have defined boundaries, so you can push someone up against a wall - or an electrified fence - and attack. Best of all, the animals will bruise and scar or hit and cause some damage, and the area hit will show up red and ugly. Hit there again, and the flesh will be torn away, leaving a gaping raw wound. It's a cool visual effect - bite the T-Rex and you can tear away its skin to reveal a little bit of its skeletal structure. The hierarchical modeling system used by DreamWorks and BlackOps (which is also developing the game in conjunction with DreamWorks) allows for this bruising and scarring - not to mention the single layers of skin covering the beasts and the real-time lighting. Right now, the developers are tinkering with how quickly scarring will happen and how much bruising will come first - they want to keep the more brutal stuff as a reward for extra special moves or damage caused, as opposed to the automatic result of a quick punch.

Combos will be on the order of seven-string, though five-string and fewer will also be available. Button mashing will allow newbies some degree of success, but DreamWorks hopes that the five- and seven-string combos will keep more advanced fighters challenged.

The game is Dual Shock-compatible, and when you die, you'll feel the rumble. You'll also feel the rhythm of your heartbeat as death approaches. Three levels of music also cue you in to how you're doing - they change as you get closer to dying. But if you get particularly close to death, you might want to think about grabbing one of the humans, compys, goats, or cows that will be milling about: Eat one and your health goes up. In the pre-alpha version we saw, the AI for the humans wasn't in, so it was fairly easy to catch one. But when the AI is tightened up, humans and other living creatures will become properly-difficult-to-come-by health power-ups.

Many objects in the environments will be destructible, and you'll be able to unlock new dino skins as you progress through the game. It's two player and will be out sometime this fall.