One-night stand: Dino Park

Last night I had some troubles falling asleep, so I reprised my experiment with Android unknown games.

To be quite honest, this time I didn’t last long (zing!): luckily enough, sleep caught me after half an hour of play. In that short time, I got the chance to play Dino Park, a business simulation game mixed with swiping (?) mechanics, that allows the player to build his own Jurassic Park with more PEGI T-rated, and kid-friendly, dinosaurs.

Dino Park is a simple game, as in: after playing for a little while you probably already have seen it all, or most of it.

It starts with a short tutorial in which the player has no freedom at all, being forced to tap on specific icons on the screen in quick succession with very few explanations. Tap here to open your park, tap there to find your first dinosaur, etc. Now that I’ve played some recent Android games, I noticed that this trend is really popular among mobile game devs. The more a game is complex, the longer it takes to complete this “holding hand” kind of tutorial. The player doesn’t discover anything on his own, every crucial information is automatically provided by the game on a silver, shining plate. I started to wonder why this happens. Probably the huge amount of games that saturate the market force developers to shoot infos at players in the minimum time given, in order to allow them to play as soon as possible, and stay on the game. Or maybe is just a matter of audience, and platform: due the short time to play, you want to learn all the rules quick. Or something connected to the interface – or all these reasons together, plus more. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing.

The gameplay has nothing to reflect about that I didn’t already write: it’s a path from zero to hero paved with capitalistic dynamics, and portrayal of animal conviction (stretching a little here, but stay with me) as a legitimate form of profit.

There’s a mechanic, however, that I enjoyed for some reason. In order to obtain new dinosaurs, you have to dig – more excavation-related imaginary, yay! – and uncover fossils. To physically do so, the player has to swipe on the screen, removing some dirt, and then combine pieces of fossil puzzles. On the other hand, I felt like there was a severe discrepancy between the resources given to the player to complete the task, time, and outcome. Unlocking an excavation site has a price, which increases after every attempt, forcing the player to be more efficient – or to wait until the in-game earnings are enough to open the app again, and give it a new try. Plus, it requires too many pieces to fully complete some fossils, and those pieces are often hidden under rocks: to destroy rocks, the player has to use a pickaxe (having 3 of them at the beginning of each excavation) but they rarely are enough. So, the choice: spend a rare in-game resource to obtain 3 more pickaxes, or watch a 30-seconds ad. I found myself watching way too many ads in the first ten minute of play, with a disproportion between playtime and advertisingtime.

That’s all, an uninteresting post for an uninteresting game I guess. Next time I will try to find some more particular title on the store, for sure.