Dinocide is a side-scrolling platforming adventure game that pays homage to the NES classics Adventure Island I and II, complete with a caveman protagonist, ridable dinosaurs, and magic health-healing fruit.
Dinocide doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel with its gameplay, instead focusing on building a fun, retro gaming experience. If you’re looking for an old-school 2D action platformer with collectables galore, you’ll feel right at home playing Dinocide. Even the small changes Dinocide introduces to the basic platformer formula have been done before, such the game’s progressively decreasing health meter and mountable dinosaurs.
Dinocide offers up several different weapons for you to collect including a powerful, arching hatchet and a weaker, straight-shooting bow and arrow. Unfortunately, due to the level layout and enemy movement patterns, you will routinely encounter enemies that cannot be hit with either advanced weapon. With pixel-perfect precision games like Shovel Knight on the market, Dinocide’s gameplay falls short of meeting expectations. The game is also quite difficult, in large part due to the lack of a checkpoint system. Whenever you die, you’ll be booted back to the map screen, having lost whatever weapon you used in the previous stage.
Dinocide’s pixel art is cute, if a bit generic. However, if the developers want to go weird and wacky with their enemy design, emulating something you might see in a game like Super Bonk!, then the rest of the game needs to reflect that artistic decision. Right now, the presence of one-legged brain-monsters and zombie pigs feels less like an intentional choice for the game’s art direction and more like the team forgot to take out the placeholder sprites. As it stands, Dinocide needs some work, but the developers still have time to refine and revise the game before launch. As fans of the Adventure Island franchise, we sincerely hope Dinocide doesn’t turn out as a Tyrannosaurus wreck.
Download The Dinocide Alpha Demo Here (Win, Mac & Linux)