Carnivores 2
What is it?
The risks that I may face while hunting on DinoHunt Corp. property have been fully explained to me, and I understand that all risks are mine alone, as DinoHunt Corp. holds no control over the animals on their property. In the event of harm including death or dismemberment incurred while visiting DinoHunt Corp. property, I fully release DinoHunt Corp. from any responsibility, financially or otherwise, and hold only myself accountable.
This is essentialy a hunting simulation, but what you get to hunt are dinosaurs. The controls are similar to a first person shooter, but your choice of weapons is appropriate to the hunting theme: crossbow, shotgun, rifle, only the pistol seems a bit out of style.
You start out with a hundred points. For our first hunt let's choose Delphaeus Hills, the easiest and cheapest map: 20 points. We will choose the crossbow, it is strong, exact, and hardly makes any noise: 50 points. That leaves 30 points for the dinosaurs. We can get the Parasaurolophus and the Stegosaurus for that.
There are more options. We can choose radar (highlights the huntable dinosaurs on the overview map), camouflage, and cover scent. They do not cost points, but reduce the points we get from the killed dinosaurs. I always take the radar, it is really useful.
We can choose double ammo, which does not cost points in any way (I'm not sure why the choice is there at all), and we can choose to hunt with a tranquilizer. This will increase the points we get, but there won't be any trophies.
Suppose we shoot two Stegosaurs. They are worth seven points each, with radar and tranquilizer six. So we will have 112 points for our next hunt.
You do not actually spend points in this game. Your score never goes down. If you are killed, you lose only the points from this hunt.
The dinosaur A.I. is good, you always get the impression you are really confronted with animals, not moving targets, but unfortunately lacks variance. There are basically only two types of huntable dinosaurs: herbivores and carnivores. Herbivores will run away when they spot you, while carnivores will charge. Consequently they are described in the game menu either as "not dangerous" or "extremely dangerous". Only the Chasmosaurus is a bit different, as it will initially run away, but charge when wounded. Since it does so regardless of distance, it is not very realistic. A universal behavior pattern among animals is that they have a "flight circle" and an "attack circle". They flee if you cross the first, but attack if you cross the second. Now that would have been easy to implement.
A side effect of this behavior is that the step from hunting herbivores to hunting carnivores is simply too steep. It would have been nice to have something between not dangerous and extremely dangerous, some dinosaurs where you do have to be careful, but not too much.
One reviewer attested the game no replay value, I'm not sure I understand this. This isn't a game that you can finish and then replay. You go on shorter or longer hunting sprees, gain points, gain trophies, as long as you wish. Once you have enough points to hunt all the dinosaurs, with all the weapons, on the most difficult map you might feel there's nothing left, that you've beaten the game. And even then there is an incentive to start over again (you can create as many characters or "accounts" as you want), as the game also records the number of shots, and the number of successful shots. Since you will probably get better, there might be a point where you fell a dinosaur in two or three shots, but have only a success rate of 20% because of your earlier blunders. You might want to start a new account to set the record straight.
The most impressive feature of this game is its engine, the way it renders terrain. Walking around this landscape feels completely right, only the water is poorly done. When in run mode, water is not rendered at all. This sometimes looks better, especially when you are looking down from a high mountain ridge. By the way, the engine has been improved further and is available for license.
There are no limitations on complexity of structures on the map. In fact, designer can build almost everything he wants both on terrain and below the ground. The only limitation is speed. We worked really hard to make our engine work exceptionally fast. It clips off underground structures when player is on terrain and it also clips off terrain if player is inside the building. The engine renders only visible part of terrain when looking at it through the window for example. It was not an easy task to accomplish, because terrain and corridor engines are absolutely independent. Moreover, in our new engine terrain is not represented as a set of polygons, like in some other games which combine indoor and outdoor environments. Therefore, our latest technology allows you to create interactive world of such size and complexity as no other does.
I do hope this engine gets licensed a lot.
Ukrainian-based Action Forms was founded in 1995 by four enthusiasts Oleg Slusar, Yaroslav Kravchenko, Igor Karev and Denis Vereschagin. It took almost two years to form a solid professional team, including programmers, level designers, sound engineers and artists. Their first product was the run-of-the-mill shooter Chasm: The Rift, which had the bad luck to be released a year after Quake.
Their next product was Carnivores, practically the same game as this here, only in a smaller game world. After Carnivores 2 came Carnivores: Ice Age, where you hunt mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers in snow-covered forests. Then came Vivisector, once again a first person shooter, based loosely on H.G.Wells story The Island of Dr. Moreau. Enemies are animal cyborgs with integrated weapons. The game currently under development is Cryostasis:
Year 1968. Arctic Circle, Russian North Pole station "Pole 21". The main hero Alexander Nesterov is a meteorologist occasionally caught inside an old nuclear ice-breaker North Wind, frozen in the ice desert many years ago. This steel creature once fought for its life and freedom, but it has fallen into an ice trap and all the creatures on its board lost not only their natural look, but a right to die. Cryostasis is a story about a drama of a Captain and his Ship evolving in the atmosphere of animal fear.
A Pentium II 233 MHz with 32 MB RAM. These are the official requirements. The game will not run under Windows 2000 or XP.
Technically, this game is two programs running at the same time: The game engine and the renderer. It sometimes happens during gameplay that you get a black screen, especially if you have tab as the map (radar) button and use it a lot. Just hit alt tab, a little toolbar will pop up with the icons of all running programs, 95 style. Hit tab till the Carnivores Renderer is the active one, everything should be okay.
debugup enters debug mode. Dinosaurs will ignore you until attacked, and the following functions are added:
None of this is recommended. The game is most fun when played without any cheats.
The __res.txt is found in the huntdata subdirectory. It contains all the data for the weapons and dinosaurs. This info is from the Carnivores 2 game site, which unfortunately has very annoying popups.
Leave the start value at 100. Changing it does not affect gameplay or how much money you start out with, and could cause unwanted problems. Changing area, dino and weapon to lower numbers reduces the price of that item, so your initial $100 goes much furthur. You can set all those variables to 0 and have all maps, weapons and dinosaurs at your disposal.
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There have been a number of Jurassic Park licenses, the oldest one dating from 1992. They more or less followed the lines set by the movie, and have basically a shooter theme: stay alive and get out. Trespasser might be the one most similar to Carnivores 2.
Of course, before Carnivores 2 there was Carnivores: pretty much the same game, but only three weapons and fewer dinosaurs. The engine was already very good, I think I even detected some sort of mist on one of the screenshots you won't find in Carnivores 2, and there were six hunting locations. The pachycephalosaurus didn't make it into the second game either.
After Carnivores 2 there was Carnivores: Ice Age, again pretty much the same game except that you get to hunt mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers and the like. This time, with a single exception all the animals are huntable. Weapons are the same as in Carnivores 2. There exists what is called a full-featured demo, only limited to 30 minutes of gameplay. At first I thought this was a per-session limit, instead it's something like the Windows XP product activation. You can play this half hour for free, then you have to pay to keep on playing. It's 72.2 MB download and will not install on XP.
Carnivores: Cityscape on the other hand was quite a different sort of game, developed by a completely different team. If you're into first person shooters, then maybe this is not such a bad game. But if you are looking for something like Carnivores 2, stay away, for it isn't.
