In just a few confusing moments World War II fighter pilot Mike Wired goes from dogfighting over the ocean to being plucked out of time, a swarm of pteranodons closing in on him as he wonders who the heck teleported the sci-fi gun he’s now holding into his han—Ready? Go!
Now you’re in control, Mike is still plummeting through the air, and all of those dinosaurs circling the tasty time traveller are your problem. I really hope you took a deep breath before the game began because it’s not going to give you the time to take another until you hit the end credits.
If that intro isn’t what this hobby’s all about, then I don’t know what gaming is. Gun Survivor 3: Dino Crisis, AKA Dino Stalker, has got spirit. It’s so thrilled by the thought of sharing its madcap ideas with you it keeps trying to show you ten at once. It’s constantly exciting, unapologetically weird, and as brilliantly Dino Crisis 2: The Next Generation as any game could ever be.
Well, almost.
As you may already know, Capcom’s Gun Survivor series is an unrelated string of light gun games with varying styles of added adventure-ness wrapped around of the respected genres framework. The original PlayStation game is pretty much first-person Resident Evil years before Ethan Winters came along, the second entry, based on Resident Evil: CODE: Veronica, is a crummy disc filled with disappointment and regret, and then they made up for it afterwards with this, which tries to combine the dino-blasting exploration of the PlayStation game it’s based on with the more straightforward dino-blasting of a traditional arcade-born light gun game.
(Gun Survivor 4: Biohazard: Heroes Never Die, AKA Resident Evil: Dead Aim, is also a real treasure of a game, but I’ll save that story for another day)
As strange as that seeimingly incompatible mixture may sound, the basics will still feel very familiar to fans of all of those Virtua Crisis’ of the Deads. The aim is, as it should be, it shoot almost anything that moves with either your standard gun’s bottomless supply of bullets or whichever limited-use special weapon you last picked up—and to do it quickly, because if the (generous) timer hits zero you’ll have to start the stage over from the beginning. Coloured crystals can extend the time limit but usually only by a few seconds each, so accuracy and quick reflexes are important: there’s no point taking four seconds to hit a distant target that only gives three back, after all. Deciding whether it’s worth wandering off around a half-hidden corner in search of medkits and rocket launchers or following the arrow shown on the radar no matter what is another important consideration, these additional supplies often enough to definitively tip the coming battles in your favour… so long as you rush for them right now and then get back on track, rather than spend too long lost (or fighting additional dinosaurs) in the undergrowth.
Wait a minute: Wandering around? Radar?
Ah yes, this is the part where Gun Survivor 3 tries to reinvent the wheel by adding sparkles and glitter and then maybe an extra wheel on top. In this game you are truly free—time permitting—to wander just about anywhere you can see, as if you’re playing a (very slow) first-person shooter. Even when you’re stuck in some sort of moving vehicle, such as a boat powering downstream, you can still rotate the view a full 360º, as well as tilt it vertically too. Being able to simply step out of the way of an incoming attack, or back off if something’s getting too close, honestly takes some getting used to in a game like this. It almost feels like I’m cheating.
This freedom could make things very difficult very quickly, as you might not even be looking at a dinosaur when it launches an attack. Gun Survivor 3 has already thought of this, which is why that handy radar always shows where every enemy is, and will even highlight ones about to move in for the kill in an eye-catching orange. Of course there’s not much point in knowing you’re about to be attacked if you can’t do anything about it, and that’s where the game’s “Quick Search” function and strong aim assist come into play. A quick tap of the relevant button will swing your view around to the most immediate threat, and if a dinosaur’s leapt out of the tall grass off to the side or it’s performing a vertical jump close by, the aim assist will then kick in, trying to keep these hazards roughly in the centre of the screen. The final bit of help comes from the dinosaurs themselves. When the terrible lizards do make their move it’s only ever after an extended period of deliberately theatrical swoops, windups, and lunges, giving you plenty of time to line up your shot.
Exactly how you enthusiastically re-fossilise them is generally up to you, as not only can you attack from multiple angles, but you have a small collection of shot types available at all times—standard (which can be augmented with more powerful bullets), sniper, and a limited-use special weapon that is basically whatever fancy thing you last picked up—a flamethrower, a rocket launcher, that sort of thing. Exactly what you use and when you use it is entirely up to you, although it’s worth keeping in mind that special weapons are there to be fired, not saved for some point in the future that never quite turns up. If you’re killing things faster than you did before, then you’re Gun Survivor-ing right as far as the game’s concerned.
As great as all of these ideas are, they do tend to cause problems for, um, everyone. Play while holding a G-Con 2 and you’ll struggle in the free-roaming sections, the little d-pad on the back of the controller trying its best but not quite up to the task. Stick with a good old DualShock 2 and you’ll find shooting more than a little stiff, the almost-but-not FPS-ish control scheme lacking the speed and fluidity of a light gun.
It’s well worth persevering with whichever of these awkward control schemes irritates you the least though, because not only is this a beautiful game filled with everything from surprisingly destructible hot and humid forests to harshly lit city streets, but there’s also no way you’ll predict what happens next in a game where random objects can drop out of the sky without warning and you end up fighting a dinosaur-controlling dinosaur in hyperspace engineered by a computer from the future.
Gun Survivor 3 seizes every opportunity to mix things up. One minute you might be fending off plesiosaurs as they rear out of the water, in another you might need to shoot away the metal barrels a rampaging triceratops kicks up, or keep a T-Rex at bay as it crashes through a shopping mall, leaving broken neon signs in its wake.
The game really didn’t have to try this hard, but I’m glad it did anyway. It may not be the most refined light gun game ever made (to my mind Virtua Cop 2 and Time Crisis battle for that crown), but it’s bold and memorable and it’s trying to do something fresh while still staying true to its own roots. It’s a messy joy to play, and it’s never failed to make me smile.
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 