Make sure they stay extinct.

Welcome to the Jurassia Park for hunters. Yes, Carnivores takes the best of your hunting simulations and puts a prehistoric twist on things. So, get ready for a high stakes version of Deer Hunter.

Although there is no story behind this game, it’s interesting the way it’s presented. When you set up a profile, you’re required to click accept or decline to a waiver. The waiver states that the corporation is not responsible for any possible death or dismemberment that may occur during your hunt on the island. To be honest, I found this to be quite humorous. Moving on , the game provides a Trophy Room for up to 20 hunts. You can move around your trophy room like you would in the normal game, however if you collect more than 20 kills, the sequential will not be added. The trophy room displays the height and weight of your kill, as well as which of the 5 islands you bagged it on. Overall, a pretty neat feature and well integrated.

Well, the graphics are good or bad depending on your rig. This is one game that actually gets worse with newer PC’s. If you’re using a Voodoo 2 (or in my case, a Lithium Banshee), the game has smooth skinned dinosaurs and runs smoothly under an OpenGL setting. Lake water has a nice, reflective quality to it (but not real time reflections). Even your guns will catch the sunlight in just the right way. If you have a more powerful graphics card that doesn’t support the 1999-2000 version of OpenGL, you’ll be forced into direct rendering. Well, I can’t say that this is very good. If you hit the run key, any water from lakes or oceans disappears. Dinosaurs look more like Tomb Raider 1 creatures with blocky joints and horrible skin decals. Although the movement remains life like, the difference between the two is just astonishing. It surprises me that with better technology, I was unable to get better graphics.

The audio has its ups and downs. A good number of dinosaurs sound life like. Despite this, they have the T-Rex and Spinosaurs sounding just off. The Spinosaurs sounds more like an alien from a low budget sci-fi film saying “wow”. As for the T-Rex, this sounds like they had a strong audio clip, but then cut it out quickly. It seems more like the tail of the roar’s wav file is missing. As for the others, they sound just OK. Velociraptors have an almost sadistic whisper of a growl. Carnosaurs sound passable. Overall, I’m not particularly fond of what they’ve done for audio. It does the job, but not as well as one would hope. Considering the Jurassic Park movies have really set a standard for dinosaur sounds, these don’t even sound like they tried. The weapon sounds are about what you’d expect from a budget title. Although most sound passable, the pistol simple sounds like they exploded a firecracker in the sound room and decided that would make a good sound. Above all, not very convincing.

During game play, you tackle dinosaurs as if you’re hunting a cyber demon in Doom. Creep around and try not to be seen. If seen, avoid getting hit at all costs. Since you have no health and you’re hunting animals six or more times your size, pretty much every hit is fatal. The best way to hunt is to move slowly and stay down wind of your prey. You can equip various weapons and utilities to aid you in your hunt. There are cover scents, better camouflage, noise reduction, and tracking devices to assist you in the stalking of your prey. Once you find them, you have your choice of pistols, crossbows, shotguns, and other weapons to take them down. Using any device to aid your stalking ability will decrease the credits received from the kill. The weapons require you to spend credits to use them in a hunt. So, to get better weapons, you need to kill as effectively as possible. Credits are very essential to the game, as they can be used for unlocking other hunting locations and prey.

The game gets super glitchy at times. First, dinosaurs will occasionally walk by you without noticing. This is most obvious with carnivores. Once in a while, I’ll take a sniper rifle to a high cliff and hunt. While supposedly safe from my high perch, dinosaurs will charge straight up a steep, 90 degree mountain side. Since I couldn’t climb this on my own, I assumed I’d be safe, but apparently this isn’t the case. Also, if you jump off a high location into a tree, dinosaurs will climb the tree to get you. It’s just odd to see a T-Rex standing on top of a palm tree while eating my character. Oh, and I think Jesus raised some of these animals in their infancy because they can all walk on water while chasing you. In other words, swimming to safety is not an option. Another note is that the game does not run smoothly on WinXP. It’s odd, but they reverse compatibility feature will run the game, but you still get problems with menus as well as entering and exiting the application.

I must admit, the islands you can hunt on are fairly diverse. They range from dense jungle to barren wasteland. Despite the diversity, the dinosaur population seems to intermixed. It seems like they have more of a random spawn point for the animals than actual grouping. As such, I find it difficult to hunt a specific species. When you start, you can only hunt herbivores. At times, you’ll be hunting an herbivore and a carnivore will take you down. They spawn them anywhere and this looses the authentic feeling because of a lack of territory. Even the aggressive herbivores should have a stronger sense of territory and drive away the carnivores when threatened. At the end, they have nice locations, but bad grouping of the animals.

Well, I can’t say this game was a total loss. To be honest, although it has many glitches, it is quite fun. Since this is a hunting game, the only replay value it has to offer is collecting trophies. Out side of that, there is nothing to drive players to want to continue hunting in the same 5 locations. I’d say this is a GOOD GAME, however I wouldn’t go outta my way to pick up a copy. Carnivores 2 is a value title that will keep you playing off and on, but not necessarily for long stretches at a time.

Please Note: The following specs were used in this review. Deviation from these specs may alter your gaming experience.

Setup #1:
Operating System: Win98 (First Edition)
Processor: 350 Mhz AMD K6-2
System Memory: 64MB
Video Card: Lithium Banshee 16MB
Audio: Generic Sound Card with Stereo Support
Speakers: Generic 4.1 Surround Sound System in Stereo Mode

Setup #2:
Operating System: WinXP Home Edition
Processor: 2.2 Ghz Celeron
System Memory: 1GB
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9600 128MB
Audio: Generic 4.1 Surround Sound
Speakers: Generic 4.1 Surround Sound