![]() ![]() ![]() Like in the Adventure Island NES game that clearly inspired it, the main character of Dinocide has a constantly depleting health bar that must be refilled by collecting the various fruit and meat floating around the levels. One benefit of the mounts is that they give players a second health bar. There are actually a handful of different dinosaur mounts that players can obtain in the game, and while they each have little quirks that set them apart from one another (for example, the T-Rex can walk on lava, and the plesiosaurs can swim underwater), they fail at making one feel that much more powerful. The items that players can collect, and subsequently lose thanks to cheap deaths, range from weapons like tomahawks and boomerangs to mounts such as a fire-breathing T-Rex. It seems as though it would make much more sense to encourage players to backtrack to previous levels to build up their inventory in order to alleviate the difficulty of the later levels, but since that's not the case, the inventory system becomes virtually pointless in the later stages of the game. There is no backtracking in Dinocide, which seems like an odd choice given the inventory system at play. The worst part is that in the later levels, if the inventory is depleted, players are forced to keep pushing through and hope for the best. Then it's possible to get through the second half without the use of the more powerful weapons or the mounts, but going without is ridiculously difficult at times. So, the first half of Dinocide is spent building up the inventory, as there is little to no reason to actually equip anything before going into the levels at that point in the game. Players are then able to use these items later at their leisure, but using them and dying results in the items disappearing entirely. These items can be found in the levels, and they are added to the inventory by finishing the levels with them. ![]() As players progress through Dinocide, they are able to collect weapons, dinosaur mounts, and gems to help them on their adventure. One of the reasons why the latter half of the game is so frustrating is its inventory system. On the contrary, Dinocide abruptly goes from being extremely easy for the first half of the game to incredibly hard in the second half, in what amounts to one of the most jarring difficulty spikes one is likely to come across in gaming. It is not a gradual climb to the frustration either. ![]()
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