Code Violet Review: Expenses Were Spared
A few months ago, I found my old Dreamcast while organizing my garage and couldn’t resist the urge to hook it up. In a shortsighted move, I’d previously sold most of my collection on eBay, but one title I still had was Dino Crisis. I popped it in, played for an hour or so, and ended up wondering why it has yet to receive the same remake treatment that Capcom’s Resident Evil series has enjoyed.
Fast-forward to now, developers at TeamKill Media have tried to address that with the release of Code Violet, a game heavily influenced by Dino Crisis, and, by extension, the Jurassic Park films. Were they successful in tapping into that nostalgia? Well, to appropriate a quote from the original film, the developers were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Things begin when you’re awakened from some kind of cryo-sleep to find the facility you’re in is overrun by prehistoric monsters intent on killing anyone they encounter. Your primary goal is simple: escape. Accomplishing this won’t be straightforward, though, as you’ll need to make your way through one dinosaur-infested complex after another along with brief jaunts outside.
As a concept for driving the action forward, it works. The story that’s built around it is more of a mixed bag. You play as Violet, whose role was to produce eggs at a surrogate facility to help the human race after an unknown cataclysm befell Earth. Details are scarce with limited cut scenes and few secondary characters, and much of the fleshing out is done via data logs you’ll find on your journey.
While I want to avoid spoilers, it’s worth noting that although the game manages to generate some interesting ideas, most of them go unresolved. Think of it like this: Imagine if Mass Effect continually referred to the Reapers...and then they never made an appearance of any kind.
Like a lot of games, Code Violet throws various twists and turns in. Some work all right. Others further muddy already unclear waters. It’s not terrible, but I would’ve preferred a more focused story that drilled down on the facility to lay the foundation for what’s going on beyond this world. Instead, it feels like a lot of surface-level ideas with minimal depth.
Visually, Code Violet is hit or miss. Running on the PS5 Pro, there are moments where the game looks good. Other times things look decidedly muddled, giving the game a budget feel. Along those same lines, level design also betrays the game’s modest resources. You walk down the same hallways over and over again, see the same art adorning the walls, hear the same music and sound effects repeatedly, and so on. Clearly assets are being reused, though at least the map functions well and should prevent anyone from getting lost.
You can’t talk about Code Violet without hitting on character design. While I’m not one to dwell on how protagonists look, Violet spends most of the game in a skintight suit with the camera positioned directly behind her. There also are options to change her outfit into all manner of clothing that could be classified as “naughty” Halloween attire. You’re free to ignore all of that, but there’s some Stellar Blade DNA.
Excellent gameplay can cover myriad sins, but that’s lacking. Gunplay is middling at best, and the game’s attempts to mix in different elements—like an on-rails shooting sequence or dodging rocks in a fast-moving current—don’t land. There’s also an issue with the camera in tight spaces where everything gets blurry, which can be frustrating. The biggest problem, however, is that the game ends up occupying a weird tweener space between survival horror and action.
One of the key tenets of the former is feeling vulnerable, requiring you to carefully manage inventory and health. Code Violet is the opposite. Instead of resource scarcity, it’s abundance. On the default difficulty, I had maxed out the generous inventory space of my pouch and the save room box by midway through the game. I was literally bypassing health and ammo pickups because I had no room (or need) for them.
Loads of ammo and health wouldn’t be a problem if the game was throwing lots of dinosaurs at you, but that isn’t the case. You’ll rarely face off with more than two raptors at once, and their AI is such that they just charge at you. The Dilophosaurus can poison you from range, and little compys run up and chip away at your health, but outside of some alligator-type creatures later on, those are the only enemy types you’ll deal with.
Ostensibly, stealth is also an option, but unless you’re using the suit’s built-in camo (which runs on short-lived batteries) it doesn’t really work. The dinosaurs seemed to know where I was within moments of entering rooms, and since ammo is plentiful there’s no incentive to hide.
Bugs were also plentiful. The game fully crashed twice during my time, and I encountered several issues. The first saw a pouch expansion disappear after a death, necessitating me to restart the game—luckily, it was near the beginning. During two boss fights I lost the ability to reload my gun, and one time the first boss couldn’t hit me. Reloads solved these, at least.
Final Score (5/10)
For all its problems, I wouldn’t characterize Code Violet as a truly bad game. During my roughly eight hours playing it, I never felt like I couldn’t wait for it to end. Instead, I kept thinking “if only.” While it’s never going to be a masterpiece, it’s possible to envision a patched version that reduces item drops, smartens up enemy AI, and adds some quality-of-life improvements (like the ability to view your current objective and collected journals) to become a worthwhile experience for dino enthusiasts.