Dinocide (PC) Review

The rescue quest starts off fairly promising. The first few levels are traditional starter levels for a platformer, and they introduce the game's mechanics without being intrusive. The caveman has an arsenal of weapons that he can use (all of which function differently), a stamina meter to limit his attacks, and a health/hunger bar that depletes as the level goes on. They're incredibly fascinating choices that put a new spin on the platformer genre, challenging the player in unique ways, and, while the first few levels are short enough to demonstrate the upsides of these mechanics, it doesn't take long for Dinocide to completely collapse under all its flaws.

When it comes down to it, the caveman's weapons are wholly uninteresting and add little to no value to the experience. As enemies are rather unaggressive and there are pitfalls everywhere, most of the enemies will just kill themselves, or can be outrun. There is no challenge in the combat, if it can even be called that.

In certain levels, our hero can mount various dinosaurs, each of which has a unique gimmick, but the addition serves no purpose, as bosses are incredibly infrequent and enemies don't pose a threat. The only real benefit is the extra bar of health that riding a dinosaur provides, which is an absolute necessity in late game. Because the health meter is constantly going down to signify hunger, later stages do not give any enjoyment at all, instead being a race to the finish, with literally every food item needing to be picked up on the way to avoid death.

Stamina should add strategy to enemy encounters and boss fights, but bosses are as underwhelming as the enemies are; they all have very simple and telegraphed patterns that incite no challenge. Perhaps more disappointingly, using a mount in a boss fight effectively ensures a straight victory, as the dinosaurs do an incredible amount of damage and provide absurd amounts of health to survive the encounter.

These faulty mechanics could be salvaged, however, if the actual level designs were halfway decent. Instead of coherent levels that flow naturally to an end point and that attempt new things, the entire game is simple left to right precision jumping. When the last levels have the same feeling of the first level, there's a huge problem. There are so many novel ideas at play, but nothing is used in a clever way, and nothing is ever truly integrated into the actual design of Dinocide.

Its greatest flaw, though, is that it just doesn't feel good to play. Movement is stiff, and jumps never quite feel like they have enough flow to them. Most deaths won't come from mistakes, but instead from the controls not being refined enough. Every aspect of moving and attacking feels clunky and underdeveloped, to the point where it becomes impossible to imagine stomaching long play sessions.