Dinocide is an action adventure platformer by AtomicTorch Studio. It’s evocative of every caveman platformer that you’ve ever played. And it’s actually a fun game. Well, to a point, that is.
Things start off quite nicely. It features your usual sort of 8-/16-bit era excuse plot, which works because it bills itself as just being the sort of game you pick up and play. Which it is. It’s a completely linear game; no NPC’s to talk to or plot points to remember. You can’t even go back to previous levels even if you wanted to. Which is a shame, because the point will definitely come where you will want to.
See, you can bank weapons and mounts. And early on, you will want to take every opportunity to do so. All you need to do is make it to the end of a given stage and everything you picked up is banked. Which is a good thing, because the difficulty quickly ramps up after the first boss. The problem with this is that if you bring an item into a stage and die, it’s gone. Which wouldn’t be half as much of a problem if the damn stages didn’t get so stingy with them, or as unreasonably difficult as they do.
That’s where the problem comes in with not being able to occasionally go back and pick up something to use in a later stage. It becomes very difficult to justify wasting one of your items to make a stage a little easier when you may very well die from a blind jump or simply by slipping off a platform due to the way edges are made (they count as slopes) and jumps are way too tight. I actually jumped back into the game after about a week, and quit immediately after missing a blind jump that killed me. There are areas that you can reach to get a benefit, only to realize that there’s no way out, making it better to skip out on whatever benefit there was to getting there in the first place.
The dinosaur mounts are all fun enough. They usually move faster than your character, have stronger attacks, and the ability to traverse terrain you normally can’t, like poisonous bogs or magma. The problem is that you wind up not wanting to waste them on the high likelihood that they’re going to be fed to a bottomless pit, so you’ll tough it out like your inner hoarder wants you to, getting progressively more pissed off.
Also, it has to be said that the hunger bar puts a really tight limitation on what you can do, acting as both life bar and timer. The further into the game you go, the more sparse food items seem to become. It reaches a point where you’ll only take the time to kill an enemy if they’re truly in your way; you don’t really get anything from killing them, and most of the time it’s just better to evade them if possible. And getting hit so much as once may spell death by starvation withing inches of food.
Graphically, the game has nice, colorful sprites. They’re evocative of the 16-bit period, which I always felt was the real apex of that style. The problem is that there really aren’t that many animations. The death animation is almost comically bad compared to the games being aped here.
On sound, the stage themes are probably the best part. They’re funky and bright, and entertaining on their own. You probably won’t notice them much over the sound of your own teeth grinding, but they’re nice. The sound effects are fairly stock, though.
It’s important to note that I don’t hate difficulty in general. I will play games regarded as difficult from time to time. Mostly as my tastes are generally mercurial and based on whether something hooks me, rather than genre. But there’s a difference from fair difficulty, and bullshit. I fell into so many pits, not because I made a poor jump that was misjudged, but because I landed on the edge of a platform and it physics’d me off. Not to mention the uncertainty of land beneath you. Most games solved that problem back in the day by letting you hold down or up to get a peek in that direction. Ironically, most of those games didn’t really need such a feature as they were well designed overall.
Dinocide really drives me nuts, because I want to like it. They may fix some of these problems over time. I, sadly, don’t have the luxury of waiting that long, though. I’ve played early access games that had more polish. As such I really can’t give it my recommendation as it stands. That being said, the old advice still stands if you want to give it a try, as full price is steep for what you’ll currently get.
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Pros: + Good music + Being able to bank items/mounts for later is cool + Lots of depth to gameplay + It’s basically Adventure Island
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Cons: – Not as polished as it should be – Often difficult for the wrong reasons – Bankable items set off your inner hoarder
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Title: Dinocide
Developer: AtomicTorch Studio
Publisher: AtomicTorch Studio
Platform: PC
Price: $9.99
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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