Dino D-Day

The Good
I find it hard to review games like Dino D Day because, for me, 99% of the game is pretty much identical to the half-life game engine on which it is based. This means it looks and feels and plays largely identically to the original game Half-Life, its many derivatives and even hearkens back to the look and feel of Quake 1. I did not find anything much to like about Quake 1 or HL1. I can say I thought the idea of dinosaurs in a WW2 setting might be fun to combine and maybe some of the ideas were mildly entertaining. But I cannot truthfully say I found anything I liked about this game. I want to post this review because I do not think game developers realise this about FPS games.

The Bad
It looks and feels and plays much like HL1. I do not like this engine because it gives extremely limited spatial awareness compared to top down 3rd person pvp games based on engines like Neverwinter Nights, Realms Online or Dark Age of Camelot. I did not like having tunnel vision in HL1 and do not like it in Dino D-Day. I also did not like that the dinosaurs are so small. I did not like the washed out yellow graphics colours either, nor their glossy overbright appearance which made my eyes hurt after about 20 minutes. It made my eyes feel like they could not focus. I did not like the sounds and I did not like the artwork. The game looked and felt like a community mod of HL1. It did not really bring to life the promising genre of Dinos in WW2 as it could have. If Dinos are to be brought in, it should capture the spirit of the terror of dinosaurs as that very old game, Crush Crumble and Chomp (TRS80 and Apple), some decades ago did very well. That game with dinosaurs is about 50x the fun of Dino D-Day because you really felt the terror in the mobs which the dinosaurs evoked. There is no terror in Dino D-Day. It is just another boring FPS.

The Bottom Line
Another boring FPS. It is a game with washed out colours and overbright glossy graphics which made my eyes hurt after 20 minutes. It plays and feels exactly like Half Life 1 and offers nothing new in terms of feeling or sense of awe.