2026 has barely begun but it’ll be shocking if there’s a worse game released this year, than this embarrassingly poor attempt to create an unofficial new Dino Crisis.
Despite all the many different ways to learn about a video game before launch, a trailer is still a vitally important factor in hyping up any new title. It’s the only reason anyone watches The Game Awards and even when publishers present raw gameplay footage it’s always in such a highly orchestrated fashion it might as well just be another trailer.
We say this because we assume the trailers for Code Violet are why it, quite inexplicably, became the most pre-ordered game on the PlayStation Store this month. Admittedly, there was nothing else new out at the time, but there are plenty of promising games planned for February and as impressive as the footage might seem at first glance you can smell the jank a mile off – whether you’re familiar with the previous work of developer TeamKill Media or not.
There is another possibility to explain the game’s unexpected success and that’s that the world of gaming is secretly pining for a new Dino Crisis and so people are willing to take whatever they can get. We wish that was true, because we’d love to see a remake or new entry, but to say Code Violet does not fill that void is an understatement 65 million years in the making.
If you’re not familiar with the Dino Crisis series – and it has been over two decades since the last one – the original was basically Resident Evil but with dinosaurs instead of zombies. Heavily influenced by Jurassic Park, it was still a survival horror, although the sequel was more of a straight action game, and the third one was… terrible. Although still not nearly as bad as Code Violet (even though Code Violet borrows more from it than you’d think sensible).
Capcom has seemed to change its mind multiple times when it comes to remaking Dino Crisis, but at the moment they appear to have no such intention. Nevertheless, Code Violet tries its level best to look as much like the Resident Evil remakes as possible, in terms of its visuals and the style of third person action.
Code Violet is a strange beast though, as while it does rip off several sequences from both Dino Crisis and Jurassic Park it also swipes from a bewildering array of other sources, seemingly at random, including other dinosaur games like Turok and unrelated genre favourites like Alien. This is actually a very common approach with these sorts of fan-made games, where the number one priority always seems to be to include as many immersion-breaking external references as possible.
In that sense, Code Violet is very reminiscent of Daymare: 1988 and a host of other semi-professional homages. We wouldn’t normally seek to review such games – we don’t want to rain on an enthusiastic amateur’s parade – but there’s a very obvious problem with all this: Code Violet costs £40 and anyone watching the trailer and expecting a fun, old school romp is going to be very, very disappointed.
The plot is as convoluted, and full of steals from other sources, as the rest of the game, but all you need to know is that it’s the future and you’re controlling Regina Violet, a one-dimensional action protagonist forced to wear a variety of impractical clothing options, as the in-game camera pervs over her implausibly perfect body.
This is despite TeamKill Media claiming that the reason the game is a PlayStation 5 exclusive, is that they don’t want PC gamers making ‘sexual mods’ of the main characters. As if things could get any tawdrier than they already are.
The in-game camera’s great at ogling at Violet but it’s terrible at framing the action, as it jitters about unhelpfully whenever you’re in an enclosed space, which happens constantly when you spend most of the game backing away from fast-moving dinosaurs in an endless series of linear, narrow corridors and lab rooms. There’re only a small handful of ordinary enemies, all of which either run straight at you as soon as they see your or, in the case of the dilophosaurus, sit around spitting acid.
You can forget all the T-Rex encounters and humanoid dino-men from the trailer because they’re barely in the game and even when they do turn up the boss battles are ineptly staged and require little in the way of new tactics – they’re just even bigger bullet sponges than the regular dinosaurs.
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The attempt to include stealth elements is also a failure, as all the dinosaurs, including the bosses, have only two stages of alertness: knowing exactly where you are at all times, even when they shouldn’t, and completely obliviousness to your existence – even if they were fighting you two seconds ago – when you turn on Violet’s invisibility suit.
Code Violet is a terrible game. Its randomness is occasionally fascinating but the only thing it really has going for it is the dinosaurs and the illusion of good graphics. And it is an illusion, in the sense that as soon as you get close to anything the textures become an ugly mess.
Then there’s the endless parade of bugs and glitches, from the broken lighting system to assets that don’t load when you enter a new area. The sound is just as glitchy and there’re all kinds of other problems, from weapons and the controls themselves suddenly not working to the artificial intelligence just switching itself off.
Maybe some of that can be fixed in the future but it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing in the game that’s worth saving. The gunplay is weightless and it’s often very unclear whether you’re actually hitting your target. There’re no proper puzzles and rarely any reason to stop and explore. Code Violet is a vapid, broken, entirely un-entertaining experience and the only truly positive thing we can say is that the only way is up from here, when it comes to gaming in 2026.
Code Violet review summary
In Short: An amateurish mess masquerading as a homage to Dino Crisis, which might be defensible as a well-meaning fan project, if it wasn’t for the outrageously unreasonable price tag.
Pros: At least someone’s trying to make a new Dino Crisis game. Some of the graphics are quite good, if what you’re looking at is far enough away at the time.
Cons: The action is terrible, the controls and camera are awful, the plot is nonsensical, the main character is treated in an embarrassingly sexist manner, and the game is riven with bugs and glitches that make it almost unplayable at times.
Score: 1/10
Formats: PlayStation 5
Price: £39.99
Publisher: TeamKill Media
Developer: TeamKill Media
Release Date: 10th January 2026
Age Rating: 18
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