Warpath: Jurassic Park has to be one of the most innovative beat-ups ever. Instead of the usual martial arts or magic, fireballs and flashes of light for every punch, you have realistic dinosaurs feuding in a plausibly vicious manner. The novelty of fighting as dinosaurs gives Warpath an edge over, say, Tekken or the newer Dragonball Z fighters, that feature humans.
The graphics are incredible considering the age and platform. I didn't think the PSOne could manage the look this game features. The realism is fine, except for the scale. No matter how tremendous the dinosaur, no human (or sheep, or dog, or goat, or cow... you can eat practically anything) ever looks that small. I mean, an adult male Homo sapiens is bigger than a tyrannosaur's head, let alone its tooth! Instead of being intimidating, the exaggeration of their size instead seems ridiculous. Speaking of dinosaurs, there are tons of them that the movies never featured, including an extremely inaccurate (but VERY ferocious) reconstruction of Spinosaurus, a good Suchomimus and Albertosaurus. Many unlockable dinosaurs I only got to see by waiting for a demo to start up. It just takes too much time to unlock the majority of dinosaurs. Seriously, you need to finish one for unlockable no. 1, twice for no. 2, thrice for no. 3, and so on! There are something like 8 or 9 new dinosaurs to unlock, and the game doesn't allow you to save your progress. How can you play for 12 or 13 hours just to unlock a tremendously cool dinosaur, and have no energy left to play with it? That's just indecent!
If you never watch a demo and don't see all the cool dinosaurs that can be unlocked (they can be unlocked, at least by untiring robots), which means you don't know about them and will be perfectly happy to play with your default roster. The bloody, violent fights are replayable and fun, until you've played for three or four weeks, get bored, and only revisit it every now and then. I was disappointed upon finding that there is NO Create-A-Dino mode. It would be a pretty good idea to include such a feature if they decide to make a Warpath 2, or something for PS2 or other next-gen platforms. For today's gamers, who may not be totally happy no matter how many polygons developers throw at them, Warpath is probably doomed to gathering dust in an old, battered CD case.
