by: Steve Simons

February 26, 2008

I think my biggest complaint about this game is the A.I of the humans. Friendly’s will get in your line of fire and stay there, or insult you. They will be telling you to keep up or be left behind when you are clearly in front of them, or possibly berate you for not killing things fast enough. Enemies, well that’s a different story altogether. It seems they have the worst vision possible and there isn’t a pair of glasses anywhere on this planet. You can run into a room and someone will spot you and start shooting, sometimes his friends will also fire at you. Leave the room for a couple of seconds and sneak back in while they are still looking in your direction and they often won’t have a clue you are there. This isn’t just a distance related problem either. A decent part of the game play is being stealthy, which is something I love to do in games. The problem is the A.I is far from consistent, sometimes you can crouch walk right up to them and they won’t have a clue what’s going on. Other times for no reason at all they will spot you and open fire. Call me crazy but if I saw my buddy receive an arrow in the face that in turn pinned him to the wall I might look for cover. Instead the A.I will either not notice his dead friend or he will stand in place and scan the area for a moment then go about his business. We have to play by the rules but the A.I does not, which can cause bouts of gamer rage. When a thought out strategy is destroyed because your enemy suddenly became psychic..well that’s just no fun at all. Aside from that the A.I on the human side can also be downright stupid, standing in front of each other or standing in the open as you pump them full of bullets. On the flip side the dinosaurs behave pretty realistic or at least I think they do, sorry the real ones were before my time.

One of the shining aspects of this game is how the dinosaurs look and move. They obviously spent a lot of time modeling these creatures. The animation is near Jurassic Park caliber and the dinosaurs look really good unless the texture hasn’t loaded yet. If that happens they look like they have plastic wrap for skin. The Humans on the other hand are reminiscent of Streets of Rage, meaning you will see the same bad guy again and again and again..And probably at least 1 more time after that. There are also some frame rate issues, for some reason they aren’t as common as they were in the demo but the weird part is sometimes they don’t seem to happen when you would expect. You might be walking through a dark cave with nothing moving on screen and it could slow down a bit but then at another point when lots of objects are moving it will run pretty smoothly. This could be background loading and it’s not a big deal but it is worth mentioning. You will also notice some texture pop. If you have played Gears of War or Mass Effect you will know what I mean. This is an issue common with the Unreal3 engine and hopefully it’s something Epic is going to address in the latest iteration but we won’t see that until Gears 2 ships. There is also some visible seams in quite a few areas, again this isn’t a big problem but it does detract from otherwise good visuals. The jungles are lush and full of swaying grass and brush. There are some jaggies and some of the textures are downright muddy. The lighting also could use some work, sometimes objects and people seem to glow. You will also notice some brightness inconsistency and a lack of good Dynamic Range Lighting. Some of the issues can be seen in videos for the game but a lot of them aren’t apparent until you are running the game at 1080p on a 40+ inch screen. None of the graphical issues are deal breakers, but we have seen better quality and more variety in games released in the last few months. If this is the direction the series is going to keep moving in then everything here is a decent first effort. Touchtone Interactive is news to gaming and this is a good first effort, amazing if you consider its coming from a movie studio.