A 2D/3D Jurassic Park themed platformer with a slew of bugs and tedious level design.

Story

The once attractive Jurassic Park has become a chaotic place where about 20 different species of dinosaurs and an army of human hunters struggle to survive. The vicinity has become a deadly display of what happens when 120 million years of evolution converge. This is really the place where only the strongest survive – make sure you are the strongest!

The Game

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a 3D platform game based on the movie with the same name. In the game you play as five different species through 30 levels. You will be playing as both dinosaurs and humans, and the goal for each scenario is basically the same – stay alive and get to the end of the stage. As such the game is based on a very well-known and standard formula where you start at the left and seek your way to the far end. On the way you will need to solve puzzles, jump on platforms, defeat enemies and avoid various hazards.

Controls

The basic controls are easy to grasp, but there’s these abnormally long transition animations in between all your moves that restrict your inputs. Whether you duck, jump or attack there’s a ‘recovery animation’ where your character regains their stance and during that time you can not perform any other action. This makes for really sluggish controls overall, but once you get into the rhythm of it, you’ll eventually adapt to it. We found that it can be annoyingly difficult – for all the wrong reasons – to land on small platforms and to make consecutive precision jumps because of this.

Your available actions differ somewhat depending on which species you are playing. Their differences can be learned with a quick trial-and-error session even though they involve at least two different types of attacks with the dinosaurs and grappling hook usage with the humans. The controls are slightly more advanced with the humans as they can fire their weapon in eight directions, fire their weapons while in the air and also switch weapons and make evasive moves on the run.

Health can be gained by eating from dead dinosaurs, or by collecting medi-packs depending on which species you currently play. Other than the health bar, when you play as a dinosaur the game also sports an instinct indicator in the form of a dinosaur eye at the top screen. It is hard to distinguish its effects, but it is supposed to indicate the level of your killer instinct – supposedly your damage increases when the eye turns red. The effects aren’t very notable and the game mechanic doesn’t seem very well thought out.

Content

The story is very loosely represented in the game but it will take you through some different events such as a huge fire that engulfs the forest and a volcanic eruption. You will get to play as a Velociraptor, a Tyrannosaurus, a human scientist and a human hunter. Most stages take place mainly in or around the forest, but also underground caves and science labs will be explored. Some levels allow scrolling vertically – in other words: platforms in multiple layers. Here and there you’ll also find tunnels that take you to new areas.

The game can be played in three different difficulty levels, and features a password function that lets you save your progress once you complete a chapter in the game. In the first few stages you play as the Compsognathus dinosaur called Elegant Claw. This is a very small and agile dinosaur capable of doing fast leap attacks and high jumps.

The game starts out nice and easy but you’ll soon notice that some of the obstacles are quite silly. Despite the 3D rendered world, you are only allowed to walk left or right on a predetermined path – half of the obstacles in the game wouldn’t even be obstacles if you could take one single side step. The levels can twist and turn and the camera will nicely follow you but this is merely for visual effect. This means that if you see a pit or obstacle coming up, you can never be quite sure if you are supposed to jump over it, or if the camera will turn and thus allow you to walk by it (which seldom happens).

In later levels you will see that the path comes to a crossing, and you may select which path you want to investigate. These additional paths usually hold bonus items, or a switch you must use to open up a door coming a head.

We have discovered many annoying bugs and quirks in this game. First of all, fighting as the Compsognathus is very easy – you can easily win the majority of the fights in the game by simply holding down the leap attack button. Then there’s a stage in which you must avoid being stomped on by huge dinosaurs, and it can be cleared by running and then holding down the bite button. This will start an endless loop of running bite attacks and make you virtually invincible during the attack animation. When playing as the humans, the hostile dinosaurs are stunned when shot at with the standard gun. This means that they can easily be stunned indefinitely – until they succumb to the damage dealt to them.

The enemies you encounter are seldom clever enough to find you from a higher ledge, so in theory you could trick a hostile dinosaur down a shallow pit, just deep enough to require a small jump to get out of there and they will have the toughest time to get themselves out.

Far from all bugs and design problems are to your advantage though. There are many situations in which your character falls through platforms or repeatedly gets pushed around by an attacker – and it looks really jerky and weird.

You may also notice that when ever you take a hit your current action is interrupted – which is fine but most of the time you have no chance to even see what’s coming at you because the screen won’t allow you to see very far. This especially becomes a problem when you’re constantly being pushed down from using your grappling hook when you try to cross those wide gaps. There is also numerous deep pits in which you can fall down with little or no chance of ever coming out of there alive. Falling damage is a common source for damage in this game.

Graphics

The graphics in The Lost World: Jurassic Park are not exactly bad. It features some special effects such as water reflections and the 3D models are nicely detailed. The moving 3D camera does have its highlights, however the environments tend to be uninspiring and the many unnatural platform formations can break the immersion.

There are occasionally large props like huge rock formations or tree trunks in the foreground which will obscure the view of what’s going on with your character and your immediate surroundings. Enemies can even hide behind these foreground props, which becomes another source of frustration in the game.

The animations of the dinosaurs are smooth and very well done. The level design overall is disappointing because most of it is built around very tedious puzzles and obstacles that are quite illogical.

Sound

Playing this game you’ll hear a wide selection of sound effects such as dinosaurs screeching, humans screaming and various ambient sounds of the jungle. Some sounds tend to repeat a little too often, but generally it sounds good. The music is very cinematic and sounds exactly like a Jurassic Park movie – it’s tense, dramatic and overall a great match for the game as it gives that special Jurassic Park feel to the entire experience.

Summary

Thanks to the fact that you are playing as five different characters, it offers some variation through its many levels. Playing as the Tyrannosaurus isn’t the mighty empowering feeling one would have hoped because of annoying and pathetic obstacles and hunters with rocket launchers. Sadly not a single one of these five playable characters offer any real quality play experiences, but instead they all feel half-baked and have obvious bugs.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is the only game we’ve seen that tells you to go “get a life” once you beat it. Quite the fan service, eh?

Developed By: Appaloosa Interactive
Published By: Electronic Arts
Version Reviewed: Sega Saturn
Genre: Action / Platform
Players: 1
Released: 1997-11-17