Jurassic The Hunted Review (Wii)

I feel a bit guilty for enjoying Jurassic: The Hunted as much as I did. It’s only three hours long and costs $40 retail. It is clearly a budget title with a horrid story and limited number of foes and environments. It also boggles the mind how Activision can drop sure hits like Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters while keeping something like this on the payroll.

Yet I enjoyed it.

I guess that’s because it is clear that the developers knew precisely what sort of game they were making. Just one glance at the achievements proved it, as most of them are quotes straight out of Jurassic Park. This isn’t a piece of art. This is a game about shooting dinosaurs. What’s the premise? Oh, something about an expedition to the Bermuda Triangle to find a long lost scientist that...y’know what? Who cares. Dinosaurs! Didn’t you read the package? DINO-FREAKIN’-SAURS!

The story is there with the intent to laugh at. The lead character exclaiming “this is definitely a SEAL campfire if I’ve ever seen one!” is delivered in just the proper SyFy Original Movie tone to laugh at. Not only because it just sounds dumb, but because you’d imagine a Navy SEAL would be trained well enough not to leave such evidence behind. Instead of trying to tell a good story without the budget for a proper writer or voice actor, the developers focused on making something that was intentionally stupid. So you would tell your friends how badly they need to check this hilariously dumb game out.

Yet the gameplay isn’t quite suffering the same fate. It would have been nice to have a little more control over look-sensitivity (the y-axis always moves too slow compared to the x-axis), but otherwise the control is fine for foes that follow the very basic attack pattern of “charge”. Enemies will frequently attack from the front, often in numbers and never slowly.