It’s always maintained that making games is hard, so clearly doing a selection of much smaller, simpler mini-games should be an easier task. For Explosive Dinosaurs, however, such a notion isn’t true. Basic in concept and execution, the infancy of its conception makes for a rough collection, light in detail and heavy on flaws.
Clearly, Explosive Dinosaurs is one of the first ventures from developer Rawr Lab, though the game is years in the making. Presentation, therefore, is mostly a clip art style of cartoon graphics with little shading, accompanied by license free music; one or two tracks. Sounds are also blaring loud, without the possibility to tune them in-game. Options are limited to on or off and that’s about it.
On the technical front, this basic theme continues. For one, the game promotes single player, but several mini-games simply don’t work alone. The start button doesn’t function either, for that matter. The Enter key on the keyboard fixes that, but that’s never explained.
While the previous statements are mere foibles, there’s a little more punch to the flaws in execution of Explosive Dinosaurs. Controlling the characters themselves in most mini-games is tough as nails. Floating speed and barely responsive turns make it a daunting task to get through simple objectives that are usually paced to total precision with timers that leave few seconds for error. A Tron and Snake hybrid mode has almost no consistency to its rules, breaking lines and walls, changing speeds and turning at random. It’s hard to not enjoy Snake, but it’s definitely possible here. Some screens look straight out of a creator’s early Newgrounds career with figures speeding off-screen, past the same stock image of a rock, faster than Sonic.
Most mini-games are tried and true, if not overdone. All the known entities are here: Pong, Frogger, Memory, Lunar Lander and so on. There’s an Angry Birds clone, but it removes one of the critical parts of its genius, by adding movement as its flair and sticking to its weird hyper-fast, uncontrollable pace. There are, however, at least a few solid ideas, such as Twitch Plays, where the goal is just to get the dinosaur to the correct spot by spamming direction, in vein of the community-driven stream. There’s a funny spin on Memory by implementing fake download buttons. Lastly, one of the most ambitious options tasks players to program a simple attack route for their dinosaur, sort of like Frozen Synapse, to kill everything on screen in a few inputs.
Explosive Dinosaurs tries to be quirky, despite its flaws, but it does so in the same vein as the internet spouts recognizable memes. It’s not so much about the contents; it’s just about going through the motions. It’s doubtful that Mario Party would ever rely on a looped animation of Snoop Dogg to be comical. While there’s definitely a hard competition possible in this game, it will require quite a lot to overlook some harsh flaws, particularly in the main aspect of controlling the damned thing. For those that want to stick around, there are over thirty mini-games of varying range. At least, it’s a lot of different options.
Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed (@Daavpuke)
| Platform(s): | PC |
| Publisher(s): | Rawr Lab |
| Developer(s): | Rawr Lab |
| Genres: | Arcade |
| Themes: | Arcade |
| Release Date: | 2018-12-06 |
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