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Why Everyone Hates It: Dino Crisis was released at a time when the Resident Evil series and its numerous imitators were starting to see release at a rate that was flooding the market. Meanwhile Jurassic Park had worn its welcome two years prior with a lackluster sequel. Somewhat understandably, this made "Resident Evil with Raptors" a hard sell in many cases.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: It is completely accurate to describe Dino Crisis as Resident Evil with dinosaurs, thus anyone who is put off by the gameplay of that series will most likely have the same problems here.
Why I Like It Anyway: Dinosaurs, as it turns out, spice up Resident Evil in some interesting ways. The slow shambling zombies of Resident Evil are a very predictable enemy, confined to single rooms, and unable to do much more than amble forward slowly and attempt to grab the player. They only present a threat due to the limited ammo and extremely cramped hallways and cluttered rooms found throughout the series. In Dino Crisis, ammo is plentiful, and the environments are comparatively quite spacious, but this is not to the players advantage. The velociraptors which serve as the go-to enemy of the game are much faster and more agile than the player, taking a surprising amount of firepower to kill, and with the interesting ability to tackle the player to the ground and knock her gun across the floor. More notably, this being a game shamelessly, and self-referentially inspired by Jurassic Park, they can and often will open doors, suddenly appearing at inopportune times.
One would think this would lead to a much more action oriented game, but surprisingly the opposite is true. Compared to the Resident Evil games, Dino Crisis has notably more puzzles, which are much more complex and interesting, usually involving high tech machinery manipulating objects in a 3D fashion. More significantly, the whole game is to a certain degree, just one large puzzle. As with the Resident Evil series that spawned it, it is to your extreme benefit in Dino Crisis to avoid combat as much as you possibly can. The problem here of course is that unlike Resident Evil, where some tricky slalom running through thinly spaced zombies and similar tasks allow a lot of combat to be avoided, here, dodging past dinosaurs only gets one so far. They will inevitably catch up on a straightaway, and getting a door between you and them is ultimately just a stall tactic. The game actually will track the location of each raptor, and given enough time and a route they can follow, follow they will.
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This ceaseless pursuit means most interesting part of the gameplay is to deprive them of the aforementioned routes to your position. In addition to the standard long wide corridors, a network of air ducts connects various locations in the game, and a system of laser-bar based security shutters allow certain hallways to be cut off until deactivated once more. With enough careful planning and a willingness to travel an increasingly convoluted path, one can eventually reach a point where an impressive number of enemies can be avoided for the bulk of the game. This of course also comes with the satisfaction of watching your would-be assailants pace back and forth in frustration at the barriers keeping them safely at bay.
Coupled with this mechanic is a rather interesting variation on Resident Evil's item boxes, which backed up a severely limited inventory by allowing everything you found to be stored and withdrawn from any of various large crates scattered about the game. This broke immersion rather severely, but was a necessary evil of the games' design. Dino Crisis attempts to rationalize things a bit better, and adds depth to the concept at the same time. Scattered throughout the game are three separate networks of what are essentially high tech dumbwaiters, akin to the vacuum tubes employed by banks and certain large bureaucratic organizations. Opening, for instance, a red panel on the wall allows one to retrieve any item they have previously dropped off at another red panel earlier, but would not grant access to items stored in the yellow or green networks.
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The in-game rationalization is that each network was originally used as a high-speed inter-office delivery system by different departments of the organization responsible for bringing about these various murderous dinosaurs. This leads to the interesting perk that opening a new panel for the first time (and reconnecting it to the network in the process) reveals a small clutch of items already inside, heavily weighted towards a different item type for each of the three networks. Green for medical supplies, i.e. healing items, red for weapons and ammo, and yellow for a mix of the two. The catch of course is that each panel needs to be reconnected to its network before it can be accessed, consuming a varying number of fuse-like plugs. These are, naturally, a fairly limited resource, forcing players to chose between either raiding panels for the items they need at any given time, but facing problems with inventory management in the long run, or picking one color to stick with, granting access to their full inventory from nearly anywhere, but also requiring them to employ tactics reflecting the variety of items they are restricting themselves to. This again leads to a form of puzzle solving logic stretched over the entire game.
Another odd wrinkle is that when forced into a direct confrontation, killing the dinosaurs is not the only means of dealing with them. In addition to standard ammunition, tranquilizer darts can be loaded into the shotgun obtained fairly early on. A few small darts will slow a charging enemy down some, buying time to escape, or several can be combined to make a more potent dosage, capable of instantly dropping a raptor in a single shot, and keeping it asleep for up to ten minutes. The actual duration is largely random, but again, with careful planning and conservation, a combination of tranquilizers and proper route planning make it possible to survive the entire game without ever taking, or dealing damage, outside of certain set piece sequences. This can make the action feel somewhat too easy compared to Resident Evil, but there's a lot to be said for enabling multiple play styles in any game.
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Between the relatively light action for games of this sort and the fact that dinosaurs simply aren't unsettling in the same way as a horde of mindless undead or reality warping supernatural event, Dino Crisis really isn't particularly scary for a horror game. It still manages a few shocking surprises, usually delivered by the intimidatingly large and destructive Tyrannosaurus Rex which manages to put in an impressive number of appearances for being too large to possibly fit inside the building, but the central premise is hard to take very seriously. Refreshingly, the various characters within the game share this sentiment, and spend the whole game in a generally upbeat mode. The main character in particular has an astoundingly chipper disposition, and will routinely crack jokes in a bubbly tone even when looking at severely mangled corpses and barely escaping dangerous situations.
All in all, Dino Crisis is actually a very refreshing deviation from the tone and pacing of most horror games, and it serves nicely as either an introduction to the genre for those who normally stick to less stressful adventure games, or a nice challenge to the more action oriented. Regrettably, while it did receive three sequels, all drop the puzzle solving aspect of the game to focus on straight-up action, mowing down everything in sight with heavy weaponry. The spinoff Dinosaur Survivor is a light gun game, and in a rather baffling move, the third game manages to deviate even further from the original by not only being a straight action game, but also rather bafflingly taking place in deep space. The closest thing to a spiritual successor is Resident Evil: Code Veronica, which was developed in close proximity and expounds on some of the concepts introduced in Dino Crisis, most notably the abandonment of pre-rendered backgrounds, allowing for dynamic camera work, which both games use quite effectively. Unfortunately, redrawing the map constantly and the color coded inventory management system however are concepts sill unique to Dino Crisis to date.
