Dinosaur Assassin Is Not What You Would Expect From A Game With Prehistoric Animals And Motorcycles
Dinosaur Assassin for iPad ($1.99) by CDS is supposed to be an action-packed game of hunting and surviving, but it fails at both being action-packed and at being a game. The developers would be smart to take this off the market and go back to the drawing board before it gets tagged as a crap-app, or “crapp.”
The point of the game, I guess, is to run around a big, expansive landscape and complete quests, like killing reedbucks or t-rexes. The problem is that, not only is it nearly impossible to find your prey because the landscape is too expansive, but once you do, it is nearly impossible to get a shot off before it tears you to shreds. Not only that, but there are other wild animals that will attack sometimes and run away other times. Presumably, the friendly, non-combative animals like giraffes and zebras run away while the fierce, carnivores like the saber tooth tigers and wooly mammoths attack. It is hard to tell because the friendly animals run away before you can get anywhere near them and the fierce ones will attack from behind and above more often than not, making it so you don’t even know what impaled you.
Players have a handgun and, eventually, a motorcycle to help get them through each quest. The motorcycle is very difficult to find and uses a vast amount of gasoline, which you can pick up along your travels, but not as fast as you use it. When the bike runs out of gas, you just have to leave it. You could try backtracking once you’ve found another can of gas, but because the landscape is so expansive, it would probably take hours to retrace your steps.
The mini map in the upper left corner is completely useless. It show a few important landmarks, like when you are getting close to the ocean or whether there are rocks nearby, but it doesn’t track beasts, or show you where you’ve already been. It doesn’t let you know when a pterodactyl is swooping down from above to gut you.
There is not a single shred of instructions. Sometimes the pause menu appears for no reason. When you do want to pause the game and tap the mini map to access the menu, the whole game freezes up and you have to close it in multitasking before you can start over.
This game has potential. The concept is great, but it is as if one person tried to create this massive game all by himself and, because it is such a huge undertaking, failed at every aspect of the game-making process. Well, that isn’t totally true. The graphics weren’t all that bad.
Avoid this game. Don’t spend your hard-earned two bucks on this. To the developer/creator of this game, do yourself a favor and retract it from the App Store and start over. It needs a lot of work before it can be considered a worthwhile game.
