Dinoblade

I really wanted to like this game. I beat it in one sitting, and I am (at this point) a pretty hardcore souls/elden ring player who has loved dinosaurs for my entire life. But I cannot recommend the game in this state. [h2] Lets start with the good: [/h2] - Main Spino and a lot of the dinos look COOL. I love some of their designs and i was so happy to see some of my favourite dinos shows up - Parrying does feel good. the sound feels good, the effect feels good, it very feels satisfying to perfectly parry. - Summoning defeated bosses to aid you in battle is a cool concept, its a shame it can kinda clutter and cover your screen but its still 100% worth it in my eyes. - The game looks good, there are some really pretty vistas and some boss arenas feel really cool and thematic - Boss music feels good - Spinosaurus with a sword! Thats kinda it [h2] The Neutral [/h2] - Map design was fine? some of the arenas as mentioned look great but theres loads of places that look accessible but are invisible walled off and loads of places that dont look accessible but are. half of the maps are very linear, the other half are just one big blob with 3-4 bosses dotted around the edges. [h2] The Bad: [/h2] - The game is short, I played 6 and a half hours total, 3 and a half of which were the final 2 bosses (I'll get to them at the end). It's a shame - The camera SUCKS. for both really big enemies and small enemies, it feels really hard to see them sometimes, and especially hard to track when they are doing certain moves, which is kinda frustrating in a game about precision parrying. - Sound design for enemies is repetitive to the point of being grating. Hitting specific enemies/bosses repeatedly will play the EXACT same audio repeatedly. - Most attacks have no weight to them or an inconsistent feel. Some of the abilities and attacks you have feel extremely floaty. Sometimes a boss/enemy will get flung by them and other times they just wont. - The reverse is also true, bosses can hit you and you'll have no way of really telling they did without having your eyes glued to the health bar. On top of that a lot of enemy attacks are really long telegraphed wind ups and then the attack just instantly happens. The swing is has no realistic timing and it doesn't really give you a good time to react to a lot of them, I generally just memorised the timings tbh. - Skills are almost all of your damage (until one specific sword, late into the game) even if you're heavily maxing strength, which makes the gameplay loop kinda samey and makes you wait a WHILE before you are able to kill bosses. - Sometimes you'll use a skill and bosses will just not get hit stunned at all even when they aren't mid combo or doing anything. This leads to them starting a combo and you being unable to dodge, block or parry in time to not take damage. - There's no way of telling whether you've proced your death defy. And if you do, you better hope your enemy isn't mid combo! Because otherwise you will simply fully die. - Directional roll sometimes just sends you forwards, which is the worst option because most of the things you need to roll have follow up attacks behind them, so if you roll forwards you take the next 2 attacks guaranteed. - Less of a big deal but later in the game there's an over-reliance on unblockable attacks. I get that they want you to perfect parry attacks but certain combos felt pretty punishing to learn because of it. OK SPOILERS AHEAD: [spoiler] The story is non existent, and while I did expect that, what story did exist was extremely disappointing to me. Look, I want to kill big dinosaurs, if I have no story, thats fine, but this game decided to take that concept and go "but what if we added a humanoid villain" WHY? Genuinely, the big bads being TALKING DINOSAURS IS ALREADY PEAK. WHY DO YOU NEED A SUBPLOT ABOUT HUMANOID GOOP PEOPLE BEING TRAPPED ON THE PLANET IN AN ENDLESS STRUGGLE. It actually baffles me to be honest. Speaking of the humanoid devil, Akai Tsuki was a hugely unfun boss, The first phase was kinda a step up in difficulty alone but is honestly fine. I don't like that the ranged attacks (that felt like Maliketh's destined death ngl) did quite so much damage compared to the melee ones but it's still whatever really. A couple of his ranged attacks would still do damage as they went over your head. He also bounces around a lot which can make him feel kinda jarring to fight at first. Phase 2 is where i basically fully soured on this game. Attacks are barely telegraphed, the boss is a humanoid and TINY compared to most other enemies (which alone would be fine) and his visual effects are BLINDING to the point you can barely see him to judge when he could be attacking or not. On top of that, he bounces around even more than phase 1 and has combo strings as long as some of Shadow of the erdtree bosses. I honestly would have been super ok with that if i didnt have to slog through phase 1 to try and learn it and then die extremely fast because half the attacks are unblockable and you cannot see the boss while they are happening. I also started to get a little dizzy with some of those runs. I got phase down to the point i was basically not needing to use a heal, it was such a slog. While I did level the alpha roar a lot, I wasn't actually all that fussed about it being taken from me, it felt thematic, even though i had lost quite a few boss souls worth of points for the fight. Conceptually, fighting the spino who granted us the sword at the beginning is a classic and exactly what i wanted. Due to the jank and the decision to make his true form just some dude, I was really not sold. Maakyuuri Honestly fine for the most part, some pretty satisfying combos and a solid 2 phase fight. They are just much easier than Akai Tsuki and their difficulty is almost all artificial. They summon other enemies to attack you, most of which will spawn off screen and home in on you so you pretty much have to listen for thee audio for it and thats it. The swarm of flying enemies attack can get extremely visually cluttered and it can be extremely hard to judge where the hell they're coming from and if you're even going to get hit. Jessie what the ♥♥♥♥ is a Chixoreth? [/spoiler] In conclusion, This game feels like hype moments and aura with no backbone behind it. its vapid and I honestly hope that the devs use the money and time from this to make their next project polished. This game has and had so much potential but falls short in a lot of small ways that compound to it just not being as fun as I would have liked. Huge respect to the devs, game design is hard and I think they can make a genuine masterpiece.