Touch Screen Dinos!

Ever get tired of hearing how fantastic Hay Day is? Ever want to have your own farm simulator but with dinosaurs? Well I've got the game for you; however, you may want to be careful what you wish for. Dinosaur fever is in the works with the recent passing of Walking with Dinosaurs and teases of the new Jurassic World movie. Therefore, it's a good time to discuss Jurassic Park Builder for your tablet and mobile phone.

Firstly, the game is pretty heavily based off the first movie’s settings. You'll see the familiar Jurassic Park gates and the striped green off-road vehicles made famous by being stomped on by the big T-Rex himself. The game presents you with an overview of the heavily forested park and tasks you with demolishing patches of trees to allow you further expansion of your personalized park. Much the same as any other simulator, you have resources to replenish and distribute throughout the park. In this case, you have a harbor that allows you to gather green crops for your herbivores and meat for your carnivores. Both buildings on your harbor can be upgraded to provide more of the specific resources but it's so painfully long to get them upgraded to a satisfying rate that it's not really worth-while. This leads me to my first complaint: the game tries to keep you interested by intriguing you with the notion of "new" upgrades, "new" dinosaurs, etc. However, the progression is so painfully slow that it simply becomes a nuisance. Everything requires money or a large sum of resources, and if you don't have what you need then you may opt to spend real life cash to quicken the pace. Why? Why bother designing it in such a way that you feel the game forces you to have to pay for everything? The only time these mobile games have ever had me spend any cash was if it felt like a treat to myself, not a means to proceed through the game. It's a huge issue that slows the game down significantly enough that I may find myself deleting the game far earlier than I had planned.

Consequently, what should be the most entertaining part of the game, the dinosaurs, are also let down by the fact that it takes a millennia to get anything accomplished. For instance, the early game provides you with a Triceratops that you may feed and grow to provide you cash to develop buildings and scenery. However, the Triceratops takes so few resources that you end up dumping as much money and greens into it resulting with little leftover to work with. That's fine and dandy because the game provides you with mission objectives that reward you yet again with cash and resources that are then again dumped back into the Triceratops. Okay great, now I've got a larger Triceratops and I just unlocked the Dilophosaurus who you realize earns you far more cash than your Triceratops did, but at a far lower level. This is great if you didn't already spend all your money on your 'Tops. That my friends, is the biggest issue: you always find yourself in this purgatory of not having any resources or money to spend and therefore you click away at your dinosaurs to earn money. This simply reinforces the same issue of pace. All aspects of the game are slow. You can't get excited to obtain a new dinosaur because the five that preceded it used up everything you had and therefore you probably can't afford that new Allosaurus.

Incidentally, the game does offer some joy to dinosaur fans. It provides a well-rounded collection of dinosaurs, both famous and obscure. Not that I could enjoy any end game species because I simply couldn't make it there. There's also an interesting evolution mechanic for the dinosaurs. Every ten levels that your titanic lizard achieves, it can evolve. This allows it to be reborn as a baby but with a different skin pigmentation. Although the creature was reborn, it continues to level up where it left off; meaning that if it was evolved at ten, it would now be level eleven and so on. If you level your beasts high enough, you may enter an arena mode that pits your ferocious beasts against CPU-controlled dinosaurs in a deathmatch style setting. Optionally, you may also partake in a PvP tournament but, I couldn't be bothered because every match up was against a player who was at least four times my level. That being said, the combat animations for the dinosaurs are pretty sweet and almost endearing due to some of the design aesthetics. The Ceratosaurus in particular is a chunky piece of flesh and teeth who's a bit too cute to look menacing. Likewise, the sound design is great but also uninspired. The growls and screeches the dinosaurs make are fantastic but the music and sound effects of feeding them are kind of boring and unbelievable.

All-in-all, I would pass up on the game but if you've caught dinosaur fever and fancy a trek into the world of Jurassic Park, this isn't your worst option. There's some interesting items to be exposed to and if you love dinosaurs than I'm sure you want to get your grubby lil' hands on anything that has a T-rex for a logo. Just don't expect to see a Spinosaurus or anything particularly cool unless you invest a whole lot of time and money into the game. I'll explore the prehistoric scene further to see if I can come across anything better attuned to dinosaur lovers.