Dinosaur World Review (PC)

It should have been a perfect match—prehistoric dinosaurs and a rich survival-bases blueprint. The mere thought of being able to establish a treetop base and have the chance to plunge deep into an open-ended love letter to Jurassic Park sounds like an absolute dreamboat of a good time. But, there’s a problem with such a perfect pairing: we’ve already seen it so, so many times before. And it’s due to the commonality of the double-barreled genre that the arrival of a new fossil is a lot like losing a needle in a haystack. Fortunately for the creators of the latest needle in said haystack, though, their project has something of a wild card—a never-before-seen title that will surely turn a few heads down at the local paleontology office. Folks, I give you Dinosaur World.

Dinosaur World aims to be a few things, but the thing that fuels its motor more than anything is its base-building aspect. It’s an open-world game at heart, for sure, but the game itself centers its core gameplay experience around two simple things: building a self-sustaining home deep within the jungle, and crafting tools of various kinds to both fend off looming carnivores and establish a fine line between being a mere tourist built from mush and bone, and a lionhearted survivor who can not only tackle the wilds, but conquer them, too.

It goes like this: you, a customizable explorer with little to no deeming personality traits whatsoever, have arrived on a seemingly uninhabited clusters of islands—a place that just so happens to house a “unique ecological environment” that has been around since the prehistoric era. Lo and behold, the dinosaurs never left, and although not exactly genetically enhanced, their memories retain a vital piece of information: protect, preserve, and kill.

Make a Meal Out of It

Dinosaur World may look rather generic and drab — and, if you exclude the tropical theme and historically correct foliage and natural habitat, it sort of is. And yet, it is, to some basic extent, one of those games that only gets better with age — sort of how a seasoned fossil at a dig site increases in value the further the species dates back, and so on and so forth. I say that, because like a lot of base-building games that idolize the grafting process, most of the rewards require a more hands-on approach than in alternate words. Collecting materials, fashioning items out of scrappy blueprints, and finding a good spot to call home. These are, unsurprisingly, the three primary chores that make up the preliminary phase of the journey. And you’ll either love it or you’ll hate it.

It’s a love-hate thing — laying the groundwork for a future where you can explore at will and, after so much time, reap the benefits of your labor. To say that it’s a slow process would be an understatement, I’ll say that much. And even with the inclusion of a few tyrannosaurs, Dinosaur World doesn’t do a great deal to speed up this initial evolution process. Similar to other sandbox-type base-building games, you forage, you craft, and you gradually chisel your way through a variety of biomes in the hopes that the next section will grant you the ability to unlock more, craft more, and even learn more. Again, a painfully slow process — but a process that, believe it or not, has its perks.

All Teeth, No Bite

There isn’t much of a story to chew through here, other than the one that primarily focuses on your own personal evolution as a fledgling explorer. As for why you wind up on this dinosaur-led island is a question that only you can find the answer to. But it doesn’t matter either way, as your efforts are supposed to be contributed to another purpose: to build a home and to essentially thrive alongside the prehistoric world in perfect harmony. To this end, Dinosaur World is whatever you make of it; it can be a narrative-driven experience, just the same as it can be a nonlinear role-playing game with no rules other the ones you make for yourself. And again, this is something of a double-edged sword; it lacks a formal structure, but it offers just enough freedom for you to build your own story.

As far as the actual gameplay style goes, it’s a third-person ordeal, and so, you can expect to spend a lot of your time marveling at the back of a generic cardboard cutout of a protagonist as you naturally do whatever feels right to you in the heat of the moment. Aside from having the option to tweak a few basic attributes—weight, age, makeup, and attire, for example—there isn’t a great deal for you to alter. But then, this is but a small part of the overall experience; the heart and soul of it more or less orbits the three other things—exploring, crafting, and battling.

Don’t Poke Your Eye Out

I’d be lying if I said that it was all sunshine and rainbows here. Sadly, Dinosaur World still has a lot of bugs that need to be addressed before it can amount to anything higher than a mediocre open-world survival game. From its wooden animations to its poorly rendered graphics, absurdly complex learning curve to its mismatched audio quality — Dinosaur World does, unfortunately, fall short in more ways than one, and it’s a shame, given that it could, with a bit of extra TLC, exhume its potential to become a genuine contender in its chosen field.

Verdict

Dinosaur World finds itself encased within a vessel comprised of numerous prehistoric iterations, which isn’t much different from breaking your toe, and then voluntarily shooting yourself in the foot. With so, so many base-building games based on carnivorous animals and other pages of paleontology, it’s hard to give it the credit it deserves, as it sadly falls beneath an umbrella of one too many word-for-word clones.

With all of the above said, Dinosaur World does have plenty of fantastic qualities—an original design with a lot of historically authentic features, a good amount of crafting recipes, and an environment that’s teeming with collectible items and other prehistoric fossils and memorabilia. On that basis, one could argue that a lot of research was conducted before fleshing out this world and its moving pieces. Is it perfect? Not even close, no. But then, I’d also be lying if I said that it didn’t have the potential to become something much, much greater.

Of course, if you love a good old-fashioned dinosaur game that pulls on all the same threads as a traditional base-building IP, then you’ll probably find it relatively easy to overlook the game’s shortcomings in favor of its finer details. Granted, it doesn’t have quite as much bite as it does bark, but if you’re an easy prey for the average carnivore, then you shouldn’t have a problem with serving yourself up on a silver platter for a handful of hours in Dinosaur World.