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The basic premise is that you are a young woman whose plane has crashed on Site B, the second island from Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs still roam free. Your character, Anne, now has to roam across the island looking for some way of getting off the island or at least contacting some help. Thus begins your journey through eight levels of jungle and the occasional dinosaur.
Trespasser boasts a realistic and powerful physics-based engine. Knock a barrel over and it will roll and tumble according to the direction and strength of your push. But the designers went overboard with the physics. Everything is governed meticulously by the physics engine, and that complicates even the simplest puzzles needlessly. Even the most basic puzzles, such as stacking boxes to get from low to high ground, take more than a fair share of minutes to complete, as you have to be careful not to touch a box the wrong way lest you topple your carefully constructed box staircase. If you do end up inadvertently messing up your puzzle in progress, you will have to spend even more time rearranging all the boxes. Pretty soon, a puzzle that should only take half a minute has absorbed five minutes of your time. Now multiply that by the ridiculous number of box-stacking puzzles, and you arrive at hours of tedious box pushing and pulling. In many instances, you will wish that Dreamworks had abstracted portions of the game's physics.
The action in the game is no less aggravating. There are too many tedious tasks, and there aren't any fun things to do. Exploration is a huge bother because you run so damn slow in this game. Because the levels are expansive jungles and valleys, walking from one area to the next will take way too much time. Although, if Dreamworks sped up the running to a bearable gait, it would simply take less time to figure out the game's true nature: It is nothing but an uneventful and needless hike through a barren landscape. And if you do bother to wander around the levels, you'll find much of nothing. Just more jungle, with nothing to really hold your attention.
What about the dinosaurs, which, aside from the torturous physics, are this game's other claim to fame? There are hardly any, and the ones you see are few and far between. Along your prompted path (the half-constructed monorail system), you might run into one or two brachiosaurs or a stegosaur on occasion. As for challenging and hostile adversaries, you will run into raptors one at a time during different parts of a level. The curious thing is, John Hammond tells you that raptors are pack hunters, so why for almost the entire first half of the game do you only see one raptor at a time? (For that matter, why, when they die, no matter where or how you shot them, do they always lie down in that same position?) And didn't Sam Neil's character in Jurassic Park, in reference to the hadrosaurs and brachiosaurs in Jurassic Park, say, "They do travel in herds"? He certainly did, so why is it that you see one lone hadrosaur at a time and at best two brachiosaurs? It's ridiculous. I think the early claims were for a living ecosystem, but this ecosystem barely qualifies as populated.
Another annoyance is that these dinosaurs don't act independently. One benefit of the Trespasser engine is a range of sight that lets you peer far into the distance. Unfortunately, it also allowed me to see that the brachiosaurs off in the distance didn't start moving until I got closer. It was like they were waiting for their cue to start acting. So much for sitting on tree branches to see this world come to life. And even when I did see dinosaurs interacting, it was in a disappointing fashion. I lured a raptor to a stegosaur, hoping to see some gory, tail-slapping action, only to witness the stegosaur try to bite the oncoming raptor. At least that's what I assume the stegosaur did, because it tried to poke its assailant with its snout. Everybody knows that a stegosaur would defend itself with its wickedly spiked tail... everybody, it seems, except the stegosaur.
The list goes on. There are numerous collision detection bugs. Dinosaurs crashed into each other, boxes got pushed through walls, a brachiosaur impaled itself on a few trees. Many times I walked into an area to see the resident dinosaur fall 50 feet from the sky or jump up that same distance, turn around, and then crash back to the ground.
The voice acting is lackluster. Minnie Driver (as the main character, Anne) can't even muster up an ounce of excitement when she sees a dinosaur for the first time (guess it's an everyday occurrence for her), and Hammond's and Anne's voice-overs sometimes make no sense. One time, at a waterfall, Anne started talking about sleeping at a bus stop and eating vending machine food. What that had to do with her stay on Site B, I don't know. It was as perplexing as the rest of this game.
You still want to hear more? Well, the arm looks ridiculous, and you can get it to bend in sickening ways that no human would be able to bear. It's also absolutely ludicrous the lengths the designers force you to go through to pick up an object. Yes, it's realistic, but it sure as hell isn't fun having to jut out your hand at every object and then hit two keys while maneuvering your arm to the precise point to pick it up. Half the time, I ended up pushing the object around like some drooling idiot instead of picking it up. And why couldn't Anne have scrounged for a backpack at the crash site so she could carry more than two items? Better yet, why don't your two items carry over from level to level, even though it is supposed to be a seamless level transition? You see what I mean? This game is just too frustrating, too boring, too tedious, too enamored of its vaunted physics engine. It's a good engine, if you don't consider the bugs, but it doesn't amount to much of a game.--Elliott Chin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good game,
A Kid's Review
= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Trespasser (CD-ROM)
I don't know why everyone els says Trespasser is bad. I think it's a great game! There are tons of weapons and junk to use against the dinos, and the levels are huge! The graphics are great too. The controls in the game seem kind of hard and annoying at first but it gets easy when you used to them. There are some glitches in the game but there pretty small. This game is one of the best games I have ever played.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A game where imagination out weighs the story.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Trespasser (CD-ROM)
About 3 out of 5 people that comment on Trespasser say they love it. About 1 out of 10 of them are reviewers. The reason for this, I believe, is that Trespasser is not for the "Sunday drivers" of the gaming industry. There are a couple of reasons for this; 1.) The hand alone is hideous enough to scare most people away, and other than the magnificent dinosaurs, the graphics engine is a bit weak, for all the power it consumes. 2.) The game did not come through with all its promises, and that's a frustrating thing to deal with as a consumer. The positives, though, are simply staggering. The physics engine is unmatched. The models are highly realistic, and range from tiny to so huge that the ground quakes when they walk. Seeing dinosaurs is a fantasy of most people, and the chance to interact with them would be even better. You can do this. You could pat em on the back, roll them down a hill, swing a log at there head or drop a few tons of steel on to them. Not to mention shoot them. If not the game, then the engine itself deserves a second chance. I would not recommend this to the casual gamer, that's why I didn't give it 5 stars. Although, I've been playing games since I was 4 years old. I have never before been able to realize a fantasy to interact with a false world. Trespasser brought me somewhat closer though.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
hmmm,
By Xip (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Trespasser (CD-ROM)
I was given this game (it was literally falling to bits, but the CD is fine)Of all the games out there, I think this game - if you look at it in terms of 'a concept' - is probably where the future of games will go (and should go) someone here had mentioned the physics engine - I'm no physicist, but Trespasser's physics engine is the best I've ever seen (and I have used MathEngine and Havok) - a physics engine that was developed between 1996 and 1998 that in itself is just simply staggering - who are these people at Dreamworks messing with a physics engine before anyone knew what a physics engine should be used for? moving on - Trespasser's 3D sound seems to be appearing in games coming out just in this year alone - that alone, is simply another staggering concept Trespasser is just way ahead of its time (the big problem inherent in it) on to the game - it's awful; I'm sure - with the best intentions - that a whole load of dynamics were applied to the game to make it stand out from the crowd; and it certainly managed that. Only that standing out from the crowd and being a complete jerk is probably not the way to do it I have noticed reviewers here not mentioning exactly what is needed to play Trespasser - well it sure is NOT a PII or an AMD K6. The best results I've seen were K7 (1.4Ghz) and an FSB clock speed of 166Mhz on the AMD platform - anything less will kill it when you switch on the full detail that Trespasser is capable of. And talking of the graphics card, you don't need anything special. The best one in terms of cost is the ATI Radeon 9500 Pro As a concept - in 1998, people must have been in shock. Physics in a game? Woah! Hold the phone! As a game - it falls very short Someone needs to tell Dreamworks to give the license of Trespasser to someone who can combine Gameplay, 3D sound and Physics and pull it off so that it does work, and the story itself will lay claim to the fact that you can't beat it Something special is here in Trespasser, but like a piece of coal, you'd never see the diamond inside without applying a bit more pressure (development) Trespasser should have the emphasis on weapons, virtually removed. It's pathetically ridiculing the game's concept
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