Dino Storm is the kind of game that is born in the dreams of young boys. The more that you think about it, the more it makes sense. Cowboys riding dinosaurs, wielding laser guns, all in a old west setting. The game centers around a village called “Dinoville,” (bet you didn’t see that coming) where everything is bought and sold with Dino Dollars (you wish I was making this up). On paper (or wherever you happen to be reading this) it sounds just crazy enough to be an early April Fool’s prank, or a fever dream, but then you pinch yourself on the face and realize that no, it is indeed a very serious video game.
Created by Splitscreen Studios, Dino Storm is played through the browser and features a pretty cool 3D engine. So grab your laser gun and let’s dive in, shall we?
Gameplay
So we already know Dino Storm breaks some new territory with the whole cowboys and dinosaurs theme, but the game itself lives or dies on a very simple question: Is it fun to play? And my answer is a rather confident yes. You spend 100% of the game strapped to your dinosaur, which can be moved around either by clicking to move or using the keyboard. Quests are exactly what you would expect to find in an MMO, with the added exception that there are a lot less of them, and they are all public quests. Instead of traveling to a hub and picking up twenty or so quests, each area only has one or two quest givers, each of which have one quest in progress at any given time. The quests are along the lines of kill this, escort that, or activate these nodes, nothing particularly new outside of the always-grouped factor.
Combat in Dino Storm is rather love-it-or-leave-it. You have to click on all of your targets and select a large, bulky “attack” button from the drop down menu for your character to initiate his auto-attack. As your dinosaur levels up, you do gain access to new abilities but they are very limited in scope and quantity. You can move and shoot at the same time, which is less useful than it sounds when you factor in that proximity doesn’t mean a whole lot in MMOs, even in melee settings. Your abilities are dictated by the level of your gun and the level of your dinosaur, but you only unlock two for each category and the second ability doesn’t come until much later in the game.
In order to accomplish this leveling, you’re going to need to collect an assortment of items from quests and from killing monsters. Upgrading your weapon requires copious amounts of gun tuning kits and weapon tech upgrade kits. Leveling your dinosaur requires evolution serum. With how generously tuning kits and serum drop, the more difficult item on the list to pull together winds up being the Dino Dollars which are required in the thousands early on in leveling, and oddly enough are easily purchased with cash shop gold coins.
Once you get past the initial area around Dinoville, you start getting into zones that have pvp enabled and that two-clicks-to-attack feature becomes a lot less of a hinderance and a lot more of a necessity. The menu clearly differentiates between players and mobs, and since the public quests have a tendency to become one massive clustertruck of players and dinosaurs crawling over one another and attacking, that extra menu before you attack can mean the difference between attacking a mob or accidentally flagging yourself to another player. The system isn’t perfect, and I did see plenty of players accidentally attacking each other, but it is better than not having a safeguard at all.
One problem I have with Dino Storm in the gameplay area is over the game’s GPS-style system of directing you to the objectives, with footprints leading you where you need to go. While the system mostly works fine, there are several instances where the game is simply unable to find a path, and is perpetually stuck in the “finding your target” mode. I even had this happen while in Dinoville, searching for the casino in the same area. I would much rather have to rely on a static indicator on the map and have the system be reliable than have no indicator and have to hope that the game can figure out its own map.
The other major problem I’ve had is with overlapping quests, especially when they are radically different in level. At one point, our group of about fifteen players were tasked with escorting a caravan to its destination. That travel took us through another quest area where players were fighting high level T-Rex mobs (pictured above) which mobbed and took out our entire group in about three seconds. I don’t know what happened to the players on the quest, but they never showed up to kill the T-Rex group, and we had to wait until they despawned in order to complete the escort mission. On more than one occasion, I’ve had entire groups of bandits spawn into an area and just start randomly attacking people.
The downside to having less quest givers is of course that there is far more limited content than in your standard MMO. All of the combat quests revolve mainly around defending yourself against waves of mobs, whether it be waves of mobs in a specific area or waves of mobs as you escort a couple of trade dinosaurs. After a while the repetition begins to weigh in as you find yourself performing the same tasks over and over in order to forward the main “chapters” which are a set of tasks for each region.
Appeal
When it comes to graphics, my policy is simple: Work within your limits. Aesthetically, there is a huge difference between aiming for the middle and striking gold, or aiming too high and winding up with the product of nightmares. So I give credit to the folks at Splitscreen Studios for figuring out a style and making it work.
Dino Storm looks like a game that might have found home on the old Quake engine, which I personally find to be a more preferable direction than trying to make a realistic looking game and falling into the uncanny valley, or heading down the generic indie route of calling your game “retro” and using 2d graphics. The visuals are low-key, but charming and with their own distinct theme. The dinosaurs look good and the player models are decent enough, even though they lack in any meaningful level of customization.
The UI is one of the worst aspects of Dino Storm. It is basic, bulky, takes up far too much of the screen than it should (especially in window mode), and it’s rather ugly to boot. I have also seen a large number of threads on the forums with people complaining that they are losing their inventories during server crashes, although I have not experienced this myself.
Conclusion
Overall, Dino Storm is a game with a brilliant setting surrounding a decent game on a promising platform. The game is actually rather family-friendly, so if you’re looking for a game to introduce your son/daughter into MMOs, I’d put Dino Storm up there along with Free Realms, Fusion Fall, and a few others. The few rude players I’ve seen have been pretty unanimously rejected by the community, and the game has systems in place to protect someone from getting ganked or spawn camped, alongside an actively policing player base.
Dino Storm isn’t in the realm of hardcore gaming, but considering that after the main city players are able to freely attack one another (albeit with repercussions for doing so) and take control of spawn points, not to mention that you need to do a corpse run for your quest items and sell-able goods which are left on your body upon death, not to mention that you are most likely to die from being piled by mobs or sniped by a player, I hesitate to call it a soft core title. Instead, it’s a bit more in the range of RuneScape pre-gravestones. Think of it as a mid-core title for players who are either enticed by the theme, or are new to the genre and would like something a bit tougher than Free Realms or Fusion Fall.
I give Dino Storm a B+. Aside from some bugs, there isn’t anything wrong with the game on a fundamental level. More depth would do nothing but help it. If this is an indication as to where browser based MMOs are headed, the future looks very bright indeed.
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