Negative Gamer Review: Battle of Giants: Dinosaurs (DS)

You know how sometimes you just want to kick back, get nice and warm and watch some dinosaurs fight? Ubisoft knows too and have luckily provided us with Battle Of Giants: Dinosaurs for the DS. The first in what will hopefully become a series (though besides whales, I’m not too sure what else can battle and fits into the “giant” category. Perhaps robots).

The game has you take control of a dinosaur of your design with the end goal of being the most bad-ass dino on the block. You will take your dinosaur though 9 different prehistoric areas collecting eggs and fossil parts. Once you have collected all of them, you can move on to the next area. Fossils are dug out of specific piles of dirt and eggs are collected from other dinosaurs you’ve beaten in combat. Eggs can be spent on “evolving” your dinosaur. This is done by specialising a set number of body parts as either speed, defence or attack.

You can also unlock new colours and stripe patterns allowing further customisation. By the final level your pink fluffy dino (mine was called “Jim”) will have more bite than a classic English phone box. Rawr.

Dinosaurs can’t trace lines and neither can you.

As the name suggests, the game is centred around battles. These typically take place between you and a rival. As you wander around the map you will find there are half a dozen or so other dinosaurs also wandering around. You will need to fight every last one to get all the eggs necessary to continue. To start combat you simply walk up to an enemy and wait to be taken to the combat area. Here, you and the other dinosaur will square off and begin to fight.

Your dinosaur can perform two types of moves: attack or defend. The former simply doing damage and the latter doing less damage but also restoring some health. Over time you learn more attacks, up to a maximum of 3 of each type. Your dinosaur’s speed controls the maximum number of attacks. Each turn you can pick which attacks you want to do and the more moves you choose to perform, the higher the total difficulty of your turn.

This is where the main combat mechanic comes in. You have to use the stylus to trace around an outline of the enemy dinosaur. If your move is easy you will only have to trace round a small part. The higher the difficulty, the more you have to trace around. The amount of damage inflicted by the attacks is then proportionate to how good at tracing you were. Whoever traces around their shape the best will also get a damage bonus which stays active for the remainder of the round and can be built upon by further successful tracing.

Sadly, this is also one of the most annoying parts of the game. No matter how many times I attempted to re-calibrate the screen, the mapping was never quite right. I found that for any line on the right or left hand side, I would have to point my stylus slightly off the line for it to register as accurate. The same was the case on other DS system that I tried the game on. Considering this comprises a significant chunk of the game, the inability to calibrate in-game (and thus allow correct mapping) is very, very annoying and lead to more stupid deaths than I care the remember. Losing a battle because the input is wonky annoyed me to the point of stopping playing out of frustration on several occasions.

This lack of precision with attacks combined with the difficulty mechanic did lead to some interesting side effects however. It turned out in some situations it became easier the more difficult the attacks were. Drawing a big round face was easy work compared to a god damned foot (including toes).

Another problem connected to the combat is a lack of any meaningful numbers. You are given values showing how much extra boost your evolutions add to your moves, but no overall values to compare them too. The same goes with your dinosaur’s HP. You get a bar and during attacks you can see the values of damage or health regeneration, but at no point can you find where the actual baseline stats are. This oversimplification makes the already frustrating combat even more shallow than first expected.

Things can also get very repetitive and laborious after a while. On my first play-through I went with being an attack-type dinosaur. This was fine until I met a defence-type. In some battles, I was attacking and doing 30 damage and the enemy was defending and gaining 20 back. This resulted in some battles lasting well over 10 rounds, which was far too long. These balancing issues also show their head when you reach the tail end of the game. If you max out all of your stats in one particular area, chances are you will have no problem just button mashing your way through until the end. I found myself (at least as an attack-type) on the very final enemy, having to really concentrate on tactics (perhaps the wrong word; I found myself suddenly unable to simply win). Something I hadn’t even considered for the entirety of the rest of the game.

Still, the combat does remain refreshingly simple. I think it’s the first game for the DS I’ve been able to have a “mindless” experience with. Which made the special enemies even more of a shock. Under one of the piles of earth you need to dig up to get the fossil parts is a special, surprise enemy. This will likely be the first thing anybody tells you about when they play this game. The choice in these enemies gives me nothing but questions of the mentality of the game’s creators. It’s 150 million B.C., you’re a dinosaur and you’re digging up a fossil. Why, it makes perfect sense that you will discover a battle ready…. phone box. Or bus, or maybe even a school. A fucking school! One of its attacks is actually slapping your dino in the face with the front door. It’s either a stroke of genius from the designers, or the designers having a stroke. I genuinely can’t tell. It’s odd.

In 150 million B.C. nobody can hear you scream… for closure.

Which brings me rather nicely to my other major gripe with the game. There is no story. If I’m being honest, I didn’t give a crap about any kind of story when I started playing, but with the special enemies there just had to be a reason right? Some kind of underlying, smart plot pulling it all together. They can’t just throw a phone box at you if it’s normal? This is the first game without a story I have ever played for its narrative. More precisely, I continued playing because there just had to something explaining what’s going on, right? Right!? I won’t give any spoilers here to the ending, but there aren’t any spoilers. There literally is no reason for these inanimate objects from the future to be there.

I could also complain about how unbalanced the combat with these special enemies is, about how you have to trace the whole shape every time, but that’s missing the point of them I think. Essentially, when I was told I had reached the end, even the worse written piece of prose explaining it was all a dream or something would have been better than nothing.

Still, at least you are able to share the experience with others. With up to 6 players (in a series of 1 v 1 matches set out as a tournament) battling it out to be the best dinosaur. I was able to play some of the local multiplayer (only one copy of the game is needed, hurray!) and after a few extra steps to set up the connection, it is just the same as normal combat, only with players controlling both dinos. Sadly, the multiplayer can’t be taken online, but perhaps that’s not so much of a bad thing.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• Both over time and after taking damage in battle, you will need to eat and drink. There is always meat or fruit around, usually next to some water. Food and drink both restore 50% of your health, making it completely pointless to have to do both.
• Some messages you are given are spread over two dialogue boxes, yet the overflow is often a single word which could have fitted easily on the first message box.
• Other boxes are titled wrongly.For example, at the end of every level you are asked to continue under the header “tutorial”.
• The d-pad is not used. At all. This means to move around the world you have to use the stylus. Completely useless if you want to go left as you cover the screen with your hand. It also makes it much more uncomfortable to hold the DS than necessary.
• There is no indication of progress. When you load up the game you just pick your dino (from the 6 save slots available). Even in game there is nothing telling you how close you are to the end.
• When you complete the campaign with a dino, you can’t load that save again. You have to start again.

Battle of Giants: Dinosaurs is not a game you will play for an engrossing or innovative experience, but it’s lo-fi feel does give it a certain charm missing from most games. The combat is simple (and slightly broken to say the least) but it does do exactly what it says on the tin. You will be battling other dinosaurs (and schools) and won’t have to think too hard about it. The bugs that are there are forgiveable and the design choices rarely hamper your enjoyment. As long as you weren’t expecting too much enjoyment to begin with.

If you are the kind of person who can enjoy simple things for what they are you have already made your mind up about this game. It’s one to be played for the pure ability to say to your friend that you played it.

You should play this game if’¦

… you want to see a Dinosaur fight a phone box.

Final Score

A competent dino-romp with simple combat and little taxation on the mind. You fight a School as a T-Rex.

(What does this score mean?)