Dino Frontier Review

Dino Frontier Review (PSVR)

For the purposes of transparency, this review was created using a code provided by the company or their respective PR company. The use of a review code does not affect my judgement of the game.

Remember when you were younger and you would take your favourite toys and make them live in the same world? Well Dino Frontier will bring all those feelings back. It throws together Dinosaurs and Cowboys in what I would describe as a virtual reality table top building simulator. But, does this work as a game?

The game does not really come with a story, but it does have an end game. Which I will talk about more later in the review, but I thought I would bring this to people’s attention in case you were expecting some sort of story to the game.

As mentioned previously the game really is a table top building simulator, where you play as a character known as Big Mayor. Basically you are a huge set of hands looming over this land, and you dictate how its managed, and what your settlers do – sort of like a VR god. When you stumble across the land (your play space), you are given one settler, a dead dinosaur, and trees/bushes. So, you will set your lone settler harvesting the trees for wood to build you first building, and then to harvest the dead dinosaur for a supply of dino meat.

Then its pretty much rinse and repeat, get your settler to harvest more wood to build more buildings, build up your little village and micro-manage how everything goes. As you progress your village and levels more settlers will come to your village – until you have the maximum of eight, which is limited really. It will be your job as Big Mayor to then assign your settlers roles. You will do this by picking them up and dropping them on what you want them to do, for example onto a tree to get them to harvest it. But, you also have to be careful to make sure you have enough food to feed your settlers, to keep your settlers happy, and that you have somewhere to heal them if they are attacked by dinosaurs roaming around the edge of your village, or by bandits that might try to raid your village for resources.

The dinosaurs will come into play, after a few buildings have been built you will be able to build a dinosaur training pen. From here you will be able to periodically lure dinosaurs in and train them to help with jobs. One will collect the lumber from the trees, previously you would need to collect these yourself. One will collect water to help water and re-grow your trees and bushes, helping to reduce the amount of watering you will need to do. The final one will lay eggs regularly, helping with the supply of food needed to feed your settlers. But, as with the eight settlers limit, this brings another limit to what you can do with the game. This limit being you can only have one of each type at a time, meaning you can not build an army of wood collectors if you don’t mind harvesting dinosaurs for food and watering your own trees and bushes. The only time you will need to lure another one is in the case one is killed by bandits or another dinosaur that has not been tamed.

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More limits come into what you can do, when it comes to the building, because you can only have one of each type of building in your village. As well as creating the buildings you can also upgrade them, adding more benefits. But, once you build them all and upgraded them to the max level, you will find there is nothing left to do – so it starts to feel it’s hitting the end, rather than being open like city building simulators.

You can also move off to two sub-sections from your village, one is more a strategy based wave survival area and the second is a resources garden. In the resources garden you can harvest in peace without having to fend of bandits, where it will be your job to water, re-seed and cut them down. In the wave based area your location is a mine, where you will have to move your settlers between mining and fending of the waves of bandits sent by the Bandit King, and dinosaurs. Where at first this a lot of fun and a break from the monotony of the main village, one you’ve got your settlers trained it soon becomes very easy to survive all twenty waves.

I hear you asking, who is this Bandit King you have just mentioned? This is where the end game comes into game. The aim is to build to get strong enough to defeat the Bandit King, however, this is more just see how strong you can those eight settlers you can have. Being perfectly honest, by the time you get around to taking him on you will probably have your settlers 100% trained in fighting, and it makes this final encounter rather simple – which makes a lacklustre end game. Where this could have been made more entertaining, by still making him a challenge even if they were fully trained in fighting – because the other skills don’t seem to be needed for the final encounter at all.

Visually Dino Frontier brings cartoon-like visuals to it, but this sort of toy box approach really helps the game. The colours give the feel of what the materials should be like, and all the aspects of the game have decent looking textures on them. But, one thing that really impressed me was the ways you can approach the games view, and that the visual fidelity was always there. In Dino Frontier you can control the view-point by zooming in and out, so you can make it look like anything from a micro-village diorama or become the size of your settlers, but never mind how you looking at it, the game still looked great and crisp.

In order to play Dino Frontier you will need two Move Controllers, one for each hand of Big Mayor. Where multiple control systems are usually appreciated, I really can’t see this working any other way. Your main uses are from the triggers, each one picking things up for the corresponding hand, if your settler has levelled you can pick it up and turn the controller over and it will be stood on the palm of your hand giving more information. Even for the build menus you just grab the icon that is on the screen and pull it down to get to that section. The other buttons that are mainly used are the Move buttons, holding one lets you move around the land and your village, where holding both will let you control the zoom. At first the control system can seem fiddly and can be frustrating, especially as you settlers start to get attacked and you have to act quickly, but you will soon get used to them.

Length wise I found getting to the end game took me about four hours on my first play-through as I got used to the controls and how the game works. But, I felt once you have done it the first time you might find it hard to go back, more down the number limitation on settlers, dinosaurs and buildings. The game would have been great if it opened a free play mode at the end, giving you more options to build a super village. But, one thing Dino Frontier does is puts pacing in your progression in the game, meaning the game remains fun for the full play-through rather than just a grind to progress with no reward.

Conclusion

Many players will find Dino Frontier a charming little adventure, and a solid addition to the VR platform. With the toy box feel of Cowboy’s vs Dinosaurs bringing some childhood charm. However, where the game has strengths, it fails to fully play on these strengths, and can feel limited for a table top building simulator. But, the game is certainly worth giving some of your time.

Playstation VR Exclusive
Developer: Uber Entertainment