Making Zombies Dino-sore
Dino Robot VS Zombie is an action game with an inconsistent title. While the Play Store lists it as Dino Robot VS Zombie, it goes by a couple other names. The dashboard icon reads RDino while the initial loading screen calls it Mechanical Dinosaur Adventure. The developer XuanShiGame doesn’t seem to have a good command of English with all of the textual errors they make. XuanShiGame’s website is rather austere, with few details about their work and no contact information. Nevertheless, the inconsistency and lack of transparency from the developer make the game’s quality seem dubious.
Plot? Who Needs That?
Dino Robot VS Zombie has the simplest plot that’s so simple that it doesn’t even exist. There isn’t even that much of a title screen. This game just throws players right into the heat of battle. The goal is to mow down zombies with dinosaur mechs, which sounds like something a little boy would think up. It all feels like part of a toy line, especially since the zombies have the intelligence to operate weapons and vehicles. The primary modes include a stage-based adventure mode and a battle arena. One just needs to kill everything within the time limit without dying.
The controls of Dino Robot VS Zombie work well enough for the game’s purposes. The game is a sidescroller with a simple control scheme using onscreen buttons and a control stick icon. The control stick is mostly responsive, but turning one’s mech around can be fiddly because of its inertia. Lining up one’s attacks can be troublesome due to the terrain and difficulty telling which way the mech is facing. Moreover, the mechs can’t jump and have cooldown timers on their weapons. Of course, many of these problems are common to mech games, so it just comes with the territory.
Same Old Same Old
Dino Robot VS Zombie feels trite in many ways. When one plays enough mobile games, some things just become depressingly familiar. This game has it all: multiple currencies, loads of ads, ludicrous microtransactions and chance-based rewards. Instead of a gacha system, however, this title uses a prize wheel—not that the difference really matters. This game even likes to give the illusion of choice by forcing ads on players regardless of what they pick. Some things, like a couple of the mechs and removing ads, require payment with real money. Granted, the whole game is only worth $2.00 at most.
Overall, Dino Robot VS Zombie is the height of mediocrity. This title is like an old Flash game from the early 2000’s, but with better sound quality and broken English. It even has the same kind of generic music that simply ends at intervallic points rather than looping. Probably the most interesting thing about it is how the all of the Play Store reviews give it five stars. The amount of perfect-score reviews just seems suspicious. It’s as if someone manipulated them to bolster the average score on the store page. In short, one can do better than this game.
