Conceptually, Acre Crisis sounds really promising. It’s a PS1-era style first-person shooter with a similar plot to the original Resident Evil, only taking place on a dinosaur filled island (a la Dino Crisis) instead of inside an eerie mansion. It promises a brief 2-3 hour playtime, which pairs well with its arcade sensibilities such as a scoring system. The bigger the dinosaur killed, the more points you’ll earn – which can then be spent on better arsenal to bring down the super-sized bosses. A pistol might be fine for a velociraptor, but a T-Rex? Good luck with that.
Play Acre Crisis for just a few minutes though, and you’ll doubtlessly notice that it isn’t just the visuals that stem from the ‘90s. It also has an awkward control scheme reminiscent of the days when there was no standard set-up for console first-person shooters. Together with sluggish movement when looking around, this makes for a very rough first impression – even after playing the shooting range-based tutorial before starting the story mode. Altering the sensitivity remedies sluggish movement – preventing being chomped from behind – but there’s no escaping the botched controls.
Say “hello!” to using RT to slowly raise a weapon and pressing ‘B’ to fire, while also having to aim via the right analogue stick using the same thumb. This also leaves no fingers free to reload, jump, or run – actions also mapped to the face buttons. In addition to the weapon rising slowly – despite playing as a military police officer – switching to the melee weapons via the d-pad to deal with the ankle-biting dinos also leaves you vulnerable. Then just to throw another spanner in the works, there’s no icon after throwing a grenade. Has it bounced off an object and fallen at your feet, or has it successfully landed a dozen yards away? You won’t know until it’s too late.
The campaign is, believe it or not, open world. Only, that world is mostly formed from identical looking trees, rocks and bushes, and populated by random herbivorous and velociraptors that’ll give chase. It would have been neat if grenades could be thrown over your shoulder to kill any dinos on your tail, but that would have presumably made too much sense. If you leg it to your destination – marked using a compass – chances are when you arrive you’ll have a gaggle of dinosaurs to deal with before you can focus on the objective and explore. Sometimes you’ll be able to fight them off with a grenade and an SMG clip or two, but other times you’ll have to succumb to death and hope fewer give chase next time.
Missions mostly involve heading to key points (a factory, radio tower, air strip, etc) to regroup with your crew, who have become spread across the island following a pterodactyl attack. You often get a new weapon or a lead on how to escape upon regrouping, while also gradually unravelling the mystery behind the existence of prehistoric creatures.
Occasionally a boss fight against a T-Rex will occur when entering a larger location. If you’re ill-prepared with low ammo or zero health packs it’s then a case of trying to collect nearby reserves without triggering the fight. I was able to defeat every boss by hiding in a bunker while said boss became either lodged, motionless, in the doorway or until their body parts started to clip through the wall, leading to an easy victory. It’s fortunate that every boss area has at least one indoor location to hide in, allowing to take advantage of the dim-witted AI in this way. Battling bosses out in the open may actually be impossible due to the slow reload speeds and how much ammo they take to kill.
Another thing you’ll eventually notice in Acre Crisis, although not without blundering through it for the first hour or so, is that it only saves when entering one of the few mission related indoor locations. This means you’ll sometimes need to backtrack and enter a room just to save. It doesn’t save after buying weapons and ammo either, meaning you’ll also have to exit and re-enter a room to save your choices or face having to navigate the shop menu again when you inevitably die from being attacked from behind, swarmed while out in the open, or accidentally triggering a boss fight.
Then there’s the small matter of the final mission. After presenting 2-3 hours of relentless dino blasting and tearing across lumpy terrane at breakneck running speed, Acre Crisis suddenly comes to a halt and becomes puzzle orientated, shifting the action to a science lab. Here, three key cards must be collected, each of which has a puzzle to solve first. The solutions to these aren’t very well implemented, and to make matters worse, dinos will randomly appear every few minutes – even magically appearing within empty corridors and while trying to solve puzzles. It does at least have the decency to provide a text-based guide of where the key cards are.
While I was able to finish Acre Crisis, it was through gritted teeth and sheer determination, just so I could review it properly. It essentially boils down to crossing your fingers and hoping that you aren’t ambushed when gauntlet running from one destination to the next, all while contending with its extremely clunky controls and inadequate save system. That, and trying to find the safest and easiest way to deal with bosses. The premise is fine, but the decision to make it PS1-era inspired seems to be a means of masking its poor AI, endlessly recycled backdrops, wooden animation, and other technical issues such as clipping. 1998’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser had more going for it than this, and that was renowned for shipping in an unfinished state. Suffice to say, the search for a Dino Crisis spiritual successor continues.
David Pateti’s Acre Crisis is out 24th Oct on consoles. A PC version launched in July. Published by Sometimes You.