i have strong opinions on this!!
any time a new "dino game" comes out, i'm like YAY, and then i see that its just another game that has dinos, but you can't play as them, and i'm like AWW. and then the games that DO let you play as dinos are all survival sims???
there's apparently 422 games on Steam categorized with the tag "dinosaurs". so lets first take a look at that and broadly categorize these "dino games" in the following groups:
CHAPTER 1: GAMES WHERE YOU MAKE FRIENDS WITH DINOS
this is cute! but... that's not a Dino Game..... that's.... Human Game 2: With New Dinos
soooo many park or zoo games exist in this category, where you're just a human or omnipresent being taking care of dinosaurs
- a lot of Jurassic Park games are like this
- so many Zoo Tycoon-likes in this category, including modern games inspired by them. too many to list
- searching for other example, ex. Paleo Pines is stardew valley but you ride dinosaurs. cute!! but it illustrates my issue: the dinosaurs are flavor, they're the icing instead of the whole-ass cake
- like are we gonna call Star Fox Adventure a dinosaur game? okay moving on
CHAPTER 2: GAMES WHERE YOU KILL DINOS
why the hell would i want to shoot dinos??? we've just established i love dinos and thats why i want a dino game!!!
imagine someone telling you "oh i found this really good gardening game" and you boot it up and it turns out its a game where you play as Guns McShootem and the gameplay consists of running through people's gardens shooting all their plants to bits??
- too many to count
- the rest of Jurassic Park games fall into this category, like, the SNES game and Trespasser, etc
- recent example being Exoprimal
- all Turok games. I think... 4(?) on gamecube had playable raptors in the local multiplayer mode which was a fun to play around with
i kinda don't want to count games where you don't play as dinos as "dino games" for the same reason a first-person game where you don't shoot a gun but only look at other people shooting them shouldn't be a "first person shooter", it'd be a "first person game with shooting" LMAO
CHAPTER 3: MULTIPLAYER PVP SURVIVAL SIMULATOR SANDBOX
the main reason for this post in the first place and the bane of my existence. i think whenever a gamedev decides to make a dino game they flip a coin to decide whether to make a park sim or a survival sim
why are these so prevalent? why does everyone want to make one of these???
to get it out of the way, Ark: Survival Evolved is a hell example of this?? its like in all three of these categories so far? it's at the same time a "human game", not a dino game, where you ride dinosaurs, also you kill dinosaurs, AND its a survival game? you can't miss the target any more than this
(apparently there's a mod to play as dinosaurs but also it seems like that just makes you invisible and makes you permanently mounted on one? besides being a mod, i think that doesn't count)
anyway, survival sims are seemingly the main types of dino games (well, apart from the previously mentioned non-dino-games) that people actually work on. like, if you're looking for "dino games", these are gonna be the big ones you find and nothing else. lets list em:
- The Isle
- Path of Titans
- Beasts of Bermuda
now i realize that not liking PvP games is my personal issue, but surely i'm not the only one? i feel like i should at least give one of these a fair try (i've seen some people in my circles play Path of Titans) but the idea of having to play a PvP game just instantly turns me off
i assume the thought process goes from: "game where you play dino" -> "fight for survival" -> "players fighting against each other for survival" -> "survival sandbox"
and to be fair, a game where you have to survive as a dino in a hostile world? would be fun! nothing wrong with that
a sandbox game where you're a dino and have general, vague, open-ended objectives like "hunt herbivores" or "find mate" or "mark territory"? would be fun!
multiplayer? FUCK YEAH. everythings more fun with friends.
so why does everything have to be PvP? and like, hardcore, lose-your-character-if-you-die, style PvP? why is the only type of dino game anyone makes an intersection of all of these that culminates in making the most perfect poison against me (and probably not just me)
worse: if you look it up you'll find that none of these have "PvE"! they're all built around fighting other players and it seems like none of them have AI-controlled dinosaurs, so playing these games in PvE would just be an empty game with nothing to do. like c'mon!! you're missing an entire possible target audience here! if you add the option of having large groups of AI enemies, and let you turn off friendly-fire and things like permadeath, then at least people can play your game as a co-op game with friends, hunting NPC prey! that'd be something for me too!
CHAPTER 4: OKAY OKAY, SO WHICH ONES DO YOU LIKE?
glad you asked. now maybe i could be giving more dino games a fair try, but usually like... you can just tell if you'll like a game or not?
and... i'm gonna be honest... i can only think of very few examples...
- Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition (1994) for the Sega Genesis - these are two different games with their own stages and stories (despite how "rampage edition" might make it sound like a remake!)
they are platformer games, and in both of these you can either play as Alan Grant, or you can play as an unnamed raptor. the raptor has a very agile moveset with huge jumps and claw slashes. - Nanosaur - third person game where you play as a raptor with a laser gun. i never owned this as a kid and only played it in a shop a couple of times, but its one of the few ones i can think of so its going on the list
PLEASE PLEASE if you have any others, let me know in the comments and i'll add them here!
- Dino Run (submitted by @blaurascon) - don't know how i forgot about this one! singleplayer platformer game where you're a little raptor fella running away from an impending meteor strike
- [your dino game here! comment now]
CLOSING THOUGHTS
maybe i'm just being picky? am is? is it too much to ask for a game where you
- play as a dino?
- don't fight other players?
like if you think about it, there's not a lot of games where you don't play as humans in the first place. like, dinosaurs already have it good compared to other species.
maybe the thing i'm most sad about is that there are multiple big games where you DO play as dinosaurs, but then all three of them are laser focused to be exactly the genre i don't want to play?
also if anyone actually has experience with these survival sim dino games (or especially, also doesn't like pvp games but likes these games) i would love to hear your thoughts too!