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There is not a single genre that is not improved by the addition of dinosaurs. Go on, try to name one. I’ll wait.
You can’t, can you? Just imagine how much more fun it would be if it was “Crime and Punishment and One Very Annoyed Triceratops.” “The Iliad and the Migratory Herd of Apatosaurs.” “Animal Farm, Except Some Animals Are Velociraptors.”
What we have here, though, is the epitome of that project. This is WWII, but with dinosaurs.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3342159108
Dino D-Day exists in the realm of not quite parody, but not quite sincere vision of a war FPS game. It is immensely silly, but undergirded by actual mechanics and thought into balance, gameplay, and being a legitimate addition to the genre.
Dino D-Day follows a similar gameplay design to Team Fortress 2. Players play on one of two teams (the Axis or Allies), and as one of several classes. Teams are given a variety of goals to accomplish, ranging from capture the flag, to king of the hill, to just having an out and out bloodbath in the streets of some unnamed north African town. Interestingly, the classes differ across teams, meaning a player who is most comfortable in a particular role is confined to a particular team. This may, on the surface, seem limiting, until you consider the sheer variety of classes available.
Also, that the Axis are almost entirely dinosaurs. That makes a difference.
Dino D-Day invests more heavily in its story than might be expected for a game that very much bills itself as skirting the edge of parody. Every loading screen is lovingly plastered with a letter or telegram describing a war fought with pterodactyls and deinosuchuses, while still capturing the melancholy of a soldier longing for home. This love of world-building is reflected in the game’s mechanics themselves. The majority of the dinosaurs are on the Axis team because it is the Axis who developed the technology to clone extinct dinosaurs in a sort of Mesozoic Manhattan Project. The lone Allied dinosaur is the result of careful espionage and scientific discovery, and is a partner rather than a substitute for the Allies’ human ingenuity. Each character has a story, and each story helps put together the grander narrative of a world gone wrong, and of a war on the edge of an Axis victory.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3342159260
That there is clearly so much love put into building a full and complete world does not mean the game itself is perfect. The teams are not necessarily well-balanced, with the humans’ guns being (unsurprisingly) ineffective against dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs’ abilities are finnicky at best, while others are able to run roughshod over the entire map, roar loudly outside the enemy’s spawnpoint, and then do it all again. If it’s fidelity to class balance and a deep meta that you’re looking for in a game, this is not the place to find it.
Similarly, the maps themselves can get a bit repetitive, and are themselves not necessarily balanced. As an example, some maps have a giant tyrannosaurus that becomes a boss for the Allies to fight, while others just have a range of abandoned souks. The tyrannosaurus is always an exciting addition to the battle, but can make it disappointing when the map is instead just another souk.
Despite the balance issues and the potential tedium of having to rip the throat out of yet another American pigdog in yet another north African village, the game is just undeniably fun. The maps are filled with propaganda broadcasts, the cries of the characters taunting the other team, and the joy of scampering around a map as a tiny dinosaur. It’s delightful and silly, and always a good time.
This makes it disappointing, then, that when I play, I’m almost always playing alone.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3342158926
One of the greatest risks of any arena-style multiplayer FPS is the risk that no one actually plays the game. This is, of course, a risk with any game, but with this style of game, there isn’t a game without players. There is a dinosaur scampering around an empty map, slaughtering goats and growing increasingly saddened by the lack of outlets for its bloodlust.
Dino D-Day has a chronically low playerbase, to the point that new servers populate with bots by default. Public servers are almost entirely empty. During the play session I did for this review, my friends and I used a public server, having a grand time shooting at one another, and being left more or less to our own devices until joined half an hour later by three other players. Those players seemed delighted that there were actually people playing the game, and all of us had a magnificent time.
What makes games like this work is both the game itself and that there are others who want to engage with it. Dino D-Day is a raucous and silly good time, and I love it every time I play it. The unfortunate downside of it, though, is that that raucous good time has to be with a party I’ve assembled myself. Dino D-Day is tragically abandoned. Its last dev update was in 2016, and there are very few players online at any given time. The experience of playing it is of that lonely dinosaur, skittering through an empty souk, greeted by mirages of itself.
Dino D-Day deserves better. It is fun and an absolute delight every time I find enough people to play it with me.
Developer: 800 North
Genre: First-person shooter
Year: 2011
Country: United States
Language: English/German
Play time: RAWR RAWR RAWR
If you enjoyed this review, check out my other reviews and my curator page. Thanks for reading!