Game Review: D2 Packs Adventurous Fun

Oct. 9, 2000 -- Lara, meet Laura.

Laura Parton, the heroine of D2, is in some ways the polar opposite of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft. True, both Laura and Lara are the heavily armed female protagonists of some fairly violent video and PC games, respectively. But the similarities fade out there.

Lara has become an industry. Her action game series, Eidos’ Tomb Raider, rank among the best-selling PC and PlayStation titles. And Paramount Pictures Studio is betting this extraordinary success will translate into a big take at the box office when actress Angelina Jolie brings Lara to life on the big screen in an upcoming film based on the games.

Laura and her first game, D2, on the other hand, had a certain following, but nothing like the commercial success of Tomb Raider. Set in a hospital, D was more of a puzzler-thriller, often compared to Myst and Seventh Guest, with a little bit of a Resident Evil-edge.

Same Character, Different Game

But Warp’s D2 for the Dreamcast is not even being billed as a sequel because in the true sense, it’s not. Yes, it’s the same character, but it’s a much different game.

Laura also lacks the almost-sick sex appeal of Lara, not to mention brutal instincts and revealing attire.

Then again, Laura does run in knee-deep snow wearing a business-length power skirt and stockings (no, they don’t appear to run) and God-knows-what for footwear. She also manages to survive a plane crash in a remote part of Canada not only without a scratch, but with perfect hair and makeup. Her jacket is slightly tattered, but that’s about it.

But this is a video game, not a fashion show. And as a video game, D2 is good, clean, violent, gruesome fun. D2’s violence has earned it a “mature” rating, and not without reason: early in the game, you get to explore the corpse-littered wreck of the plane that brought Laura to frozen hell.

And one of your very first tasks is to kill a bunny.

“You shot a hare!!” the game explains cheerfully. “You get two meats.” Getting meats is a key to survival: Laura has to find her own food. Sort of like Deer Hunter meets Doom, but with a story line thrown in.

The Game’s Backstory

And that story goes something like this: after surviving the plane crash, Laura finds herself in a remote snowy wilderness populated by bizarre aliens that have a tendency to burst out of human bodies. Not just through the stomach, as in Alien, but through the head, chest, sides, stomach and everywhere else, until they become walking, crawling and squirming beasties.

The prime way of telling an infected human from an uninfected one is blood: humans bleed red; walking alien hosts ooze green into the snow.

The graphic nature of the killing is so well-rendered that it’s actually quite beautiful visually — as is the desolate frozen wilderness landscape. And if it sounds bleak, that’s because it’s set in northern Canada.

That this game takes up four discs, as opposed to the standard one, should be an indicator of how complex it is — not in terms of story and action, which are relatively standard here, but the depth and detail of graphics, and the amount of game play available.

Even if the characters have the typical slightly unrealistic motions and moves of a 3D video game, the landscape and other atmospheric elements are thrilling. The trees shake in the breeze, snow kicks up as Laura runs, and the air turns white with each breath. Maybe you get the picture, but you really have to see it to get it.

Try playing the game on a decent TV with the lights off and the home theater turned up to 11. Crank up the AC, too. Realistic? Nawww. But it does bring some fun to the mood.

Same Old Story

My biggest gripe with D2 is a basic fault of the genre: it gets bogged down under the weight of its own story. From time to time, the action gives way to short animated films. All you can do is sit back and watch — no action at all. You can skip past these, but you risk missing out on Laura’s interactions with the other characters, which are supposed to reveal hints about her alien tormentors.

These clips are at tad too long and a tad too dull. The bland story and awkward, poorly-dubbed dialog is interspersed with nice touches as when a horrible-looking monster with tentacles bursts through the skin of its human host in one of the earliest scenes. But most gamers would rather be interacting with these moments rather than watching them.

In all, these are relatively minor quibbles when compared with the joy of finding food, killing alien monsters and solving a grisly riddle.

Edward Mazza, ABCNEWS.com’s overnight producer, travels virtually to Canada on some days to help Laura figure things out.