Code Violet - Dino Crisisn't (Review)

Code Violet

Released: January 10th, 2026

Developer: TeamKill Media

Publisher: TeamKill Media

Systems: PS5

According to the TeamKill Media, Code Violet snubbed a PC release to protect its protagonist from the “vulgarity” of modders. This sentiment is somewhat at odds with a horny marketing push that includes saucy preorder costumes, a “Sexysaurus Rex” difficulty option, and lovingly crafted jiggle physics that stand out against the otherwise stiff animations.

Call me a cynic, but I’m not sure I believe the stated reason for avoiding a PC release, not when a full-on nude mod would be ten times more dignified than Violet’s cartoonishly wobbling ass. 

Dignity. Always dignity.

What I do believe is that Code Violet is desperate to be the next Stellar Blade, a game that radiates sex appeal and benefits from manufactured controversy. It yearns for its protagonist to be labeled a hottie even as TeamKill performs purity for attention. Desperation radiates from this rancid pool of digital swill, made as it is by people who will likely do and say anything to score a few more sales. If you played their last game, you’ll be as puzzled as I am that this thing gained any sort of traction. Quantum Error was so unpleasant to play and so inherently worthless that I couldn’t bring myself to review the wretched thing. 

Quantum Error’s dismal followup is wholly undeserving of any visibility beyond the average garbage you’ll find when dredging the bowels of Steam, except of course this game isn’t on Steam… and I’m sure the platform’s refund policy has nothing to do with it. 

Oh dear.

A thoroughly tepid third-person shooter at its very best, Code Violet spends the majority of its time being far less than its very best. It’s incompetent at the fundamental level, not one single moment feels good to play, and a repetitious tedium permeates throughout. The thing is pure shovelware, an amateurish bootleg of Dino Crisis that barely holds itself together and fails to be sexy because it fails at everything. 

What’s the story like? Who cares!? Something about humanity recovering from some bad shit by having some women repopulate the species in some science place, but some dinosaurs happened because of some reasons. After a vague bit of setup, you’re thrust into the barely coherent nonsense as everything goes off the rails both in-universe and in fucking general. 

Calling the game a bloody mess risks overselling it, as it implies something chaotic. Messy it may be, but it’s a distinctly dull mess, a slow and apathetic experience in which you try to shoot at very stupid enemies with a sluggish protagonist. The camera is your biggest enemy as it can’t handle fine aiming in an enclosed space, often opting to sink behind Violet so the entire screen’s obscured by her back. 

Now I have a shitty machine gun, ho ho ho.

Until you find the first safe room, this game is hell. Dinosaurs take off huge chunks of health per hit and randomly inflict a bleeding effect that drains max HP unless a tourniquet or medkit is used. At one point, I died to nothing, simply keeling over despite a lack of enemies or negative statuses.  There are almost no autosaves, which cost me at least twenty minutes of progress with the aforementioned death. 

This dynamic reverses to hilarious degrees when you locate a safe room, and it’s thanks to one glorious slice of ineptitude - when you reload a save, every item you found and grabbed will repopulate. As soon as you can manually save, you have an open license to loot the map, record your progress, then quit and return to do it again. Before you’ve left the first area, you can fill your safe room’s storage chest with valuable resources and gather so much ammo it may as well be infinite. 

The only limit is Violet’s pitiful carrying capacity. Because this game weakly masquerades as a survival horror, you can hardly carry shit even if you find an expansion pouch. Thanks to the item farming “trick”, this isn’t as exasperating as it would be, since resources are trivial enough to discard in favor of something more immediately useful. 

Naturally, there are many other broken aspects, particularly when it comes to physics and collision detection. Your HUD also likes following you to the title screen or Photo Mode - yes, this game has Photo Mode! You’ll notice I’ve not used it much for this review, because implementing one that works right was far beyond this game’s miniscule capabilities. 

I turned the brightness up for these screenshots!

Combat is a chore. Every generic gun offers bog standard mediocrity and grenades have such a delay they may as well be joke weapons. Bleeding and poison effects go from threatening to annoying incredibly quickly, puzzles are just copypasted games of Simon, and progressing through each area is a tiresome routine of running around to press buttons or find keys 

Of course, the dinosaurs are meant to be the big draw. Of course, the dinosaurs are all fucking shit. 

Velociraptors make up the vast majority of your opposition, and they suck puréed foreskin. Lumbering at you with all the grace of a corpse strapped to a Test Your Strength machine, they’re difficult to dodge thanks to stilted attack animations and deceptive delays, which might’ve been a problem if they were good at hitting things. 

When you crouch in tall grass, dinosaurs won't see you even if they walk through you.

The Dilophosaurus is a complete non-threat thanks to how inaccurate its poison squirts are. Projectiles - which are overtly telegraphed by the dinosaur’s flappy frills - consist of two shots every three seconds and they move so slowly you can lazily sidestep them. Actively avoiding them isn’t always necessary because the Dilophosaurus will likely try to spit at from behind a solid object, ensuring each shot terminates far closer to its own stupid mouth than you. 

Bosses - or at least I think they’re bosses - are similarly awful. The first one teased is an enhanced dilophosaurus that uses natural camouflage to become nearly invisible, something it literally does not do when you fight it. One boss looks and moves like a guy in a rubber monster suit, something more at home in such b-movies as Zaat and Octaman. It’s genuinely fucking unbelievable how ridiculous a sight it is. 

Ironically, the scariest enemy is the smallest and cutest. The Compsognathus is hard to see coming, often attacks in packs, and its footsteps sound thudding yet eerily quick. While I don’t think it was exactly purposeful, the dissonant audio coupled with an obscured approach is sometimes rather effective, at least when the creatures are well hidden and not just standing in an empty room for easy one-shot kills. 

This guy is a boss. He moves like a quarter-worn glove puppet.

Really though, any dinosaur you come across is a letdown. The total lack of mob variety is a definite problem, but it’s not like more dinosaurs would mean better dinosaurs anyway. No matter the enemy, every single one is intensely dumb, incapable of anything more advanced than basic aggro with such clueless pathfinding you’ll almost feel sorry for the poor bastards. 

A classic example of bottom dollar rubbish cobbled together in Unreal, it’s amazing that Code Violet had the audacity to attempt even a miniscule level of sex appeal. Of all the games to pop a boner for, one with such muddy graphics and characters who move like they have lollipop sticks for skeletons is far from the top tier of choices. I won’t be so hyperbolic as to say it looks like a PS2 game, but I will say - without exaggeration - there are PS2 games I’d sooner masturbate to. 

It’s incredibly telling that some of the background details, like the food seen in certain areas, appear more textured and lifelike than any of the main attractions. Maybe they came from a better asset pack. 

It's hard to make anything out, but that's a dinosaur trying to spit at me through a cage.

There’s a weapon upgrade system but I don’t know why. At damage level one, the shotgun kills a raptor in three shots. At max damage, the shotgun kills a raptor in three shots. Weapon skins are also available, but such is this game’s inadequacy that slinging a gun to Violet’s back strips the cosmetics away. Speaking of which, you can find and unlock new costumes for Violet, with such fits as the Ba Donka Donk skin really communicating how seriously TeamKill takes its heroine. Look, I'm not against sexy outfits, but if you're going to pretend you're above thirsty behavior, your protagonist better not exclusively parade around in costumes lifted from a Carry On movie.

You may note that earlier I mentioned the Dilophosaurus’ poison spit and neck frills. Yeah, they went full Jurassic Park on this one, complete with Velociraptors doing that weird cough call noise like they do in the film. I’d say it’s a huge mistake to remind us of a good piece of dinosaur media, but this entire endeavor is a huge mistake. A huge mistake poorly cobbled together from many smaller mistakes. 

Ba Donka Fuckoff.

The dreadful studio that brought you Quantum Error has delivered a game very much in line with its library of shameless trash. It is legitimately sad that not enough people knew of its lineage before Code Violet benefited from a whole lot of ill-gotten hype. 

1.5/10