Every year needs its marquee bad game, and just two weeks into 2026, it looks like the new yeare might already have a contender. Code Violet is a survival horror game from TeamKill Media, the team who made the apparently also awful Quantum Error from 2023. Both games are currently sitting at a 40 on review aggregate site Metacritic, and given that Code Violet only has a handful of reviews thus far, there’s still time for the dinosaur-shooting Resident Evil knockoff to tumble down farther in the ranks.
Code Violet mixes the claustrophobic corridors and over-the-shoulder shooting of games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space with the dinosaur-infested setting of Dino Crisis. Or it tries to, at least. From the sound of it, the game doesn’t pull any of this off anywhere near as well as the games it’s clearly trying to emulate, and its simplistic shooting never quite manages to make its dinosaur foes feel terrifying enough to overpower you.
“In a straight up skirmish with these scaly foes, a well-timed dash back can really befuddle the raptors, shattering their simple gameplan of running at you, taking a big swing, pausing, and doing it again,” Jarrett Jawn writes at IGN. “There’s limited space before you hit a wall or a door that might have automatically closed behind you, though, so you can only backdash so much before making yourself a much easier snack to catch. The camera will collide with these barriers far sooner than [protagonist] Violet will, rendering any encounter that doesn’t take place in the dead center of the room a completely unintelligible mess for as long as it takes you to get the camera refocused.”
Several reviewers state that everything about Code Violet’s combat seems undercooked in a way that makes it hard to even interpret visually or through audio cues. PushSquare reviewer John Cal McCormick, meanwhile, described the shooting as “limp” and its guns “weightless.”
“Shotguns should boom, but firing one in Code Violet feels like when you bite the end of the paper off a McDonald’s straw and blow through it so the wrapping flies off,” McCormick writes.
“Less of a boom, and more of a wildly unsatisfying thwip. Hit boxes seem erratic, and visual feedback is largely non-existent. It’s often unclear if you’re actually hitting your target or not until the dinosaur you’re shooting at unconvincingly keels over.”
Outside of the actual pointing and shooting, several reviewers noted the odd tonal dissonance between the game’s survival horror setting and the way it frames its protagonist Violet, with her fanservice-driven wardrobe and Code Violet’s insistence on giving players an unimpeded view quickly growing tiresome, corny, and at odds with the moment at hand.
“Although the character model is highly detailed, it is done so in a sexualised manner, which is further enhanced through the array of revealing costumes that you can dress her in at save points,” COGConnected’s Jaz Sagoo writes.
“In a pivotal moment in the story, Violet bawls at the death of a comrade,” McCormick says. “The comrade was killed by a space dinosaur, incidentally. And as the tears stream down her face, and the voice actor puts their all into each wail, the camera pans back to reveal Violet is dressed like a sexy cowgirl complete with arse-less chaps.”
If you scroll down to the comments on most of these reviews, you’ll find that a lot of folks aren’t terribly surprised by this, given Quantum Error was also a certified stinker. There are also plenty of people saying what they really want is for Capcom to bring back Dino Crisis so we can get a real dinosaur horror game instead of these knock-offs. But from the sound of it, you’re better off waiting for Capcom to pull the franchise out of cold storage than playing Code Violet.
