Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Jurassic Park: Survival

Written by John Scalzo on July 24, 2001

First Impressions: But Grandma, those are some big teeth you have!

Editor's Note: Jurassic Park: Survival has been officially cancelled by Universal Interactive. Read on for what could have been, and as always, Gaming Target will keep you posted if the situation changes.

Let the tie-ins begin! As is almost tradition nowadays, almost every halfway decent action movie is given their own video game. It happened with GoldenEye, The Mummy, Die Hard, and coming up are Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Matrix games. It's just like the good old 8-bit days when every movie had a video game to call it's own (even the craptacular Friday The 13th). Now you can add Jurassic Park III to that list.

Or more appropriately, Jurassic Park: Survival really belongs on a list all it's own. It's more like Evil Dead: Hail To The King in that it takes the existing JP franchise and adds a new chapter to it. Jurassic Park: Survival is seen through the eyes of David Vaughn, security guard (excuse me, he's a security technician, and I'm not a waiter, but a food distribution agent). Anyway, in all his security duties for the scientists who are using Isla Sorna to study real live dinosaurs something goes terribly wrong. Just like in the first Jurassic Park, a secret organization has stowed away to the island and want the dinosaur building DNA all for themselves. Faster than you can say "hold onto your butts" (Sam Jackson is my hero), David Vaughn is caught in the middle of a battle to stay one step ahead of the bad guys and keep himself from becoming a Human McNugget.

Much like Tomb Raider, David has to navigate the island finding weapons, taking out a few terrorists, liberating scientists from their terrorist captors, doing a little puzzle solving, and being verwy, verwy quiet so as not to bring attention to his walking dinner special self. And stealthily setting traps will get you far in JP: Survival as you can sic a pack of raptors on your enemies before you blow them away with your arsenal of pistols, rifles, grenade launchers, or (gulp) a cattle prod.

Nothing against Lara Croft, but the raptors and the T Rex that she blew away in the first Tomb Raider look nothing like these terrible lizards. The dinosaurs in JP: Survival are what definitely will wow most gamers. They just look so life-like. Or as life-like as dinosaurs can be, being extinct and all. Just whip out your old tape of Jurassic Park (stay far, far away from The Lost World though, free movie advice for the day) and compare those monsters to the toothy grin you see in these screen shots. And even when you're running for your life from the giant dinos, the environments David has to travel through are lush, immense, and teeming with this jungle feel. The dense jungle, the crystal water, abandoned creepy office buildings. The locales we know good and well from the Jurassic Park world, they are all here and they're looking sweet.