So I was pretty excited over Dino D-Day when it was first announced. The idea seemed goofy and it was accompanied by a campy campaign of fake WWII posters about Dinosaurs. Plus, few games let you really play as Dinosaurs that I can think of. Actually the only one I can think of is Jurassic Park on the Genesis, which was pretty awesome to play as the Velociraptor. This was back in the days when Velociraptors looked like bad ass mini T-Rexes and not this modern day “They have feathers and look like Dinosaur Chickens” bull crap.
SCREW YOU SCIENCE.
Anyway, the game seemed interesting enough that I picked it up when it was released. I may have even pre ordered it. I played it a few times and unfortunately… I got bored. Playing as the dinosaurs wasn’t nearly as exciting as it could be. The raptors are tiny, the big Anklyosaur looking tank is slow and the other guys are just boring. The 3rd person view makes aiming iffy and the controls were kind of confusing too which didn’t help. They also seemed to die pretty easily for a thick skinned giant killer lizard.
Aside from the Dinosaurs, you had some human soldiers to play as, and it was essentially a slightly bland looking Day of Defeat clone.
The creators have done some patching to try to fix some of the issues but it also suffered from another major issue, one that tends to fluctuate over time. There’s no servers. Dino D-Day is an online only Multiplayer game. There are supposedly plans for a single player campaign or some sort but they have not come to fruition yet. Due to it’s lackluster gameplay, the few servers the game had dwindled quickly. This is of course a death nail for this sort of game, no servers means you can’t even play it.
Fortunately the developers still seem to have hope for a revival. There are still patches and any time the game is on sale for cheap there is a related spike in interest by the game playing community. Personally I think even a weak Single Player campaign would help the game immensely, running around slaughtering idiot computer soldiers as a Velociraptor could be a lot of fun. They could even beef up the stats for Single player to make the gameplay more action filled instead of a constant die easily and respawn fest that it is.
I guess the bottom line is, the IDEA is neat. And the developers seem to really want to make it neat, so if you can manage to get it for fairly cheap and want to support the idea and maybe get the benefits later, then go for it. But if you’re looking for an immediate awesome payoff you may end up disappointed.
