Orion: Dino Horde has a premise, an outline, and a decent array of gameplay mechanics. However, those things only get the game so far as the overall scope of its issues comes into focus. Originally titled Orion: Dino Beatdown, Dino Horde has been improved over its predecessor; better graphics, and better systems overall. Bugs and other issues that were found in the previous game, however, can still be found here — along with a slew of new ones.
One of the more noticeable issues with the game is its lack of screen resolutions; you still get your typical 1200×1080 set ups, but the resolution maxes out at 1600×900. Playing the game on my 1680×1050 monitor at a decreased resolution was terrible; the text and images were squashed and muddled. It would have been nice to play this Unreal Engine game at its full potential; especially since I was getting well over 30 fps while in the game.
Even though the games resolution was set well below my monitors, it looked nice. The game ran smoothly and the environments look good. Of course the usual caveats of using the Unreal Engine are very much evident here; textures pop in and frame rate drops every time you respawn or load into the world. Overall the frame rate held steady throughout my time with the game, and I came to really enjoy the cartoony art style that Dino Horde has.
The gameplay of Dino Horde doesn’t offer much in terms of variety; the game is very dependent on cooperative play, and as such the survival game mode is the only big draw here — although there are other game modes such as T.Rex Rampage, Rocketeer, Dude Huge, and Ninja. In survival you team up with a group of 5 other players to survive against a horde of dinosaurs. To help you survive there are depots that you can use to purchase equipment, gear, and new weapons between each round. As I was playing through the survival game mode I began to realize the games faults.
Survival
In Dino Horde the focus is on cooperative play between team mates. However, the three classes available to play as in the game (Assault, Support, Recon) don’t do much to complement each others play styles. The support can heal teammates via an equipable tool; assaults have jet-packs that they can use to get up on higher ground; and the recon class has a cloak that will turn them invisible; all of these things, however, amount to very little cooperative play as the enemies are either easy enough to take out alone, or too difficult to promote any sort of strategic play.
The enemies in Dino Horde aren’t fun to fight against; simply put, they are dumb. It seems that the enemies only ever have three functions; one, charge straight toward the player in order to kill him; two, charge straight at the generator in order to destroy it; or three, simply run around the battlefield like their having a seizure. All these annoying little quirks in the enemies design fuse together into one massively frustrating game to play.
If you’re coming to Dino Horde to fight against your favorite assortment of dinosaurs, and don’t give two hoots about their flaws then you’ve come to the right place. As with all survival game modes, the enemies that you will encounter throughout the match will get increasingly bigger and badder. On the medium level difficulty, you’ll be facing off against Raptors, then Dilophosaurus’ and Compy’s, and so on and so forth until you get to the top of the food chain where the Spinosaurus reigns supreme. Instead of adding a more strategic element to the game, however, the assortment of dinosaurs end up becoming more of a hassle than fun to fight against.
As mentioned before there are other game modes to be played in Dino Horde. T.Rex Rampage is a PvP game mode that pits humans against T.Rex’s. The drawback to this game mode is that playing as the T.Rex is atrocious. Movement is slow and combat is boring (grab a human player and kill it or grab a rock and throw it), these things made me never want to play as the T.Rex ever again.
The other game modes available in the game were more or less taken from existing shooters. Rocketeer is free-for-all with nothing but rockets, grenades, and jet-packs Dude Huge is king of the kill but with flamethrowers; and Ninja — which is my personal favorite — pits two teams of recon against each other with cloaks, knives, sniper rifles, and shotguns.
Orion: Dino Horde doesn’t offer a whole lot of replay value. The buggy A.I and gameplay quirks keep it from becoming anything more than a generic first-person shooter; and with other games of this type offering better gameplay (i.e Primal Carnage) and value, its hard to recommend it to anyone who isn’t questioningly crazy about dinosaurs.
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