Leading up to the Dreamcast, most survival horror games featured prerendered 2D backgrounds to get around the hardware limitations of the 32/64-bit consoles.
The Dreamcast was powerful enough to fully render these worlds while still providing a significant level of detail. Initially, I thought Carrier was prerendered. I was pleasantly surprised when the camera started shifting around the environments and the game gave the player the ability to enter a first person scanning mode. There’s not much variety to the environments, but what is there looks great for being fully rendered.
Only a couple of things make Carrier really stand out in the survival horror scene. First is the ability to go into first person. Not only will it identify infected civilians, it also allows the player to get a look ahead at the environment, which is normally obscured by fixed camera angles. You also get a taser gun instead of the usual knife. It’s pretty fun to use and takes some emphasis off resource management.
