My Dinowaurs Review

Dinowaurs is a weird game. It doesn’t make sense. In it, you control a dinosaur dressed up with kites and lingerie armed with anachronistic weaponry, some of which involves launching lawyers at enemy villages. All of this can be viewed as a good thing. A fresh thing. For the most part it is. The very idea of this combination has the ability to excite people and send them to play Dinowaurs. But then, when you yourself load up the game it gets even weirder. In a bad way.

But not immediately. The cheesy elevator music rumbles on playfully in the background while you create your happy, colorful little dino. Maybe (if you’re rich enough to spend a few bucks) you throw on a moped seat, a leg warmer and a storm cloud for starters. Things are looking great! It’s quirky, funny and charming and you feel safe. But just as you get your first whiff of warm fuzzy charm you’re thrust into a dark and terrible battle. And sometimes, if you didn’t play the tutorials, it’s against another human opponent with only one intention: eliminate the enemy at all costs. You, the player, fresh off a dose of charm and care-bears now has absolutely no idea what to do. Chances are the opponent has played at least a few matches and is already hurtling himself across a war-torn terrain to end the your poor helpless noobie existence. That’s bad. Not only will any noob be utterly destroyed right out of the box, but chances are they weren’t even aware that any of this was going to happen. This is a complete failure of player preparation on the developers part. To make matters worse for this noob now turned Rage Quitter, this is a flash game. Most of the time, games don’t annihilate their players right after the starting gun. They are single player experiences with drawn out tutorials, hand-holding and sparkly points and rewards that make them feel good. This is a case of the non-curving learning curve. It’s a brick wall in the face of unprepared, unassuming, uncompetitive players.

If the noob did play a tutorial or two, they are better prepared for “waur” but they still have a long, steep climb ahead of them before they can even approach mastery of the controls, tactics and strategies necessary to be consistent in Dinowaurs. This is the main failing of Dinowaurs, and perhaps largely the reason why the game is so widely hated. If the actual design of the core game were actually that bad, many more players would be apathetic to its success. When a noob is crushed, they feel slighted or even betrayed. They’ll take that out on the comments, bug reports and rating of the game. But that’s not to say this is the _only_ problem with Dinowaurs.

It’s slow, and this is a real-time game. In the same way the art style of the game mislead people into thinking this wouldn’t be such an abusive hardcore zero-sum game, the real-time nature of combat drives people to think “action!” While there is a good bit of action, the controls are much more methodical than most would seem fit for an action-combat type of experience. Fitting an RTS into a single-character side-scrolling environment messes with player’s heads a bit. In an RTS, this kind of methodical movement is the norm, but then again that is due to the fact that the player is controlling many, many more units at a time. When controlling just one character on screen, the methodical movement appears more like drudgery than anything. That said, I’m not sure faster movement would really help the core of the design which, if you have the patience to learn, is actually quite interesting.

It is satisfying to bowl over a weaker opponent with just the SAM, but sit on the other end of one of those matches and it’s easy to see why so many players get frustrated with this type of gameplay. Getting trounced like that often feels more like watching yourself die of old age than simply losing. However, higher level matches are often more strategical and wilder than a simple low-level deathmarch to a weaker opponents demise. In an evenly matched game (if you’re lucky enough to get one) you match tactics and skill with your opponent and attempt to counter each opponents strategies by being more agile and wilder than the other. Foolish consistency often gets the best of the loser in these kinds of matches which makes the second-to-second tactical decisions interesting. In contrast to highly mismatched games, these games often feel fair and honorable, more or less because both players have an innate understanding of the game and its mechanics. When all cylinders are running like that, this game is a heck of a lot of fun.

Sadly, this kind of experience isn’t easy to come by. Balance is still a bit of an issue with some of the weapons and can lead to “unfair games” even when evenly matched. That aside though, climbing the ranks into the upper-eschalons of the Dinowaurs leaderboards is an arduous task not to be undertaken by the average casual gamer. Getting there can be rewarding for the perpetually competitive and masochistic types, but the rest of the community (and probably the majority) doesn’t posses the constitution to make it through all of that. But there is always unranked, and while it seems to be less and less popular amongst the community, if you get together a few friends and match up with each other in Yetisburg (another little piece of charm) you may find yourself having some battles that are a little easier to digest.

I’d recommend trying Dinowaurs, and if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. It’s most certainly not a game for everyone. But neither is Björk or the comedy stylings of Andy Kaufman. Everyone has their own tastes, and some things go down easier than others. Dinowaurs may be incredibly hard to even find the energy to swallow, let alone enjoy its flavor, but I honestly don’t find it to be a fault of the core design, it’s a fault of that design’s presentation, tutorials, lack of a viable single player and hardcore zero-sum nature in a casual world.