Dinobreak Review

Dinobreak is set in a fictional, alternate year of 1999 where dinosaurs have returned and overwhelm metropolitan city. As a fierce heroine, Lydia, you’ll need to gather supplies in order to survive the night and tame any prehistoric creatures coming your way.

Dinobreak is a third person survival horror game similar to Capcom’s classic Resident Evil and Dino Crisis (which was clearly the inspiration for this) series. You’ll move around picking up supplies such as ammo, health items in order to survive the onslaught. You’ll also be called upon to find keys and solve puzzles to progress… the usual classic Capcom tropes.

And yes. Before you ask, you can’t save whenever you want. You’ll need to find ink ribbons and typewriters to save. As much as I appreciate this mechanic, this doesn’t make for a game to play in short bursts, because if you can’t find ink or a typewriter, fingers crossed Quick Resume works.

You can find repair kits to repair weapons you have; which is a nice touch. Weapons aren’t unique either. You can find the same weapons multiple times; at once point I had three tactical rifle. Akin to RE, you can also find and use herbs to patch yourself up when hurt or even poisoned. And you have the same magical storage box where you can store a bevvy of additional items.

When jumping in the game, you can either do the Dinobreak story mode or Operation Feral Raptor. While the first mode is pretty self-explanatory, the additional game is basically a poor version of RE’s mercenary mode where you need to do combos, score as much points as possible and explore as much as you can. Given the story’s brief duration, it’s a nice touch to have an additional game mode.

The game’s visuals are a faithful homage to classic PS1 games; which is a nice touch and great nostalgia factor. While nowadays we focus or more realistic stuff, having an old school visual style game once in a while is a nice change of pace. It’s also dark as hell; understandably so but the flashlight isn’t that helpful. The soundtrack and ambiance are both top notch and properly creepy. Voiceovers are absolutely abysmal. I’d rather have a Jill sandwich.

The game’s first problem is a big one: the movement. It feels like the protagonist is moving through mud or molasse with a stick up her ass. She’s slow to get started; as if she was a car when you don’t push enough on the gas. The game is also incredibly short; clocking it at approximately 2 hours; even less if you use a walkthrough. Also the loading. Dear god the loading. Everytime you open a door, there’s the loading screen.

Also your character can’t run. Again. Lack of logic here because if you’re surrounded by prehistoric beasts and run out of bullet you’re screwed. Besides; whether it be zombies or dinosaurs, running is quite necessary. It also makes exploring this game a complete chore. While we’ve been conditioned to press the left joystick to run, in Dinobreak it enables Photo mode. But who are they kidding? This isn’t the type of game you’d want a photo mode in.

Dinobreak is essentially what you think it is: If you ordered Dino Crisis on Wish. This game feels like a project a high school student did as a semester project. While the intent behind this project is admirable (people begging Capcom to do something with Dino Crisis), the execution falls flat and there’s so much wasted potential here that clearly no one play tested this; unless it’s supposed to be absolute garbage by design. Don’t waste a single penny or minute of your time with this mess.