While Capcom seems to have forgotten Dino Crisis, fans of the the dinosaur-based survival horror sibling of Resident Evil clearly have not. A group of creators calling themselves Team Arklay have set about creating an Unreal Engine 4 remake of the first Dino Crisis game.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Dino Crisis‘ original launch in Japan. Leading up to this, Team Arklay have released a trailer and some footage of the crew’s alpha build of the remake.
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As their latest video demonstrates, the Team Arklay’s remake actually doesn’t have any dinosaurs in it yet. Instead, the team seems to be focusing on recreating the game’s various locations.
Team Arklay has recreated the environments while using the technology of Epic’s engine, and the results are pretty impressive. Even without any dinosaurs, the environments—coupled with the dim lighting and music from the original game—already give a foreboding sense of dread. It’s pretty easy to imagine a velociraptor suddenly poking its head out from behind each and every corner, ready to pounce on the player.
Whether or not Team Arklay will eventually add in dinosaurs is a different question altogether. It has not revealed any additional details about the remake. It’s possible that they may not even complete the whole game, focusing only on one specific portion of it. That said, the team did show recreations of some of the original game’s interfaces in another video.
Originally released in 1999, the original Dino Crisis represented a big break from its Resident Evil progenitors. For one, the game used real-time 3D graphics instead of the RE’s pre-rendered backgrounds.
More importantly, Dino Crisis took survival horror in a different direction. Called “panic horror” by Capcom, the game featured a more visceral pace, with the dinosaurs being notably faster and smarter than the shambling zombies of Resident Evil. To compensate, protagonist Regina could now move with her weapon drawn. Additionally, the game introduced the precursor to Resident Evil 4‘s quick time events, where the word “Danger” would flash on screen and players would have to push all of their buttons to survive.
With all of this, it’s easy to see how Capcom was testing ideas they would later implement into Resident Evil. Sadly, Dino Crisis didn’t survive past 2003’s badly reviewed Dino Crisis 3 on the original Xbox. Hopefully this fan remake helps drum up enough interest for Capcom to consider going back to the series in the future.
