Review: Dino Hunt 2

You can play this game here, but I do not recommend it at all. I don’t even know why I played it honestly.

There’s not much to talk about graphics wise, there’s two generic outdoor maps. One with grass and one with snow. The game randomly alternates between the two.

Your gun has infinite range and infinite ammo. Aiming is ridiculously easy, if you see a dinosaur in the distance, just move your cursor over it until your reticle zooms in, then click the left mouse button.

There are four upgrades available, but only three of them are useful. The camouflage upgrade is a joke. I’ve upgraded it twice, and it just doesn’t work. You are best off just upgrading your speed, gun damage, and your rate of fire instead.

The game only has four dinosaurs to hunt; Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Diplodocus. The models look fine for a free game, but there’s one problem. The dinosaurs aren’t animated. They just float around the map like ghosts. When they die they just fall headfirst and clip into the ground.

The AI is a joke, I’m not even sure if I should call it AI. If a dinosaur is near you, or near a dinosaur that got shot, it will head straight for you, no matter what. This becomes a massive problem in the later levels and makes the game extremely boring in the early levels. They only make noise when they kill you, not when moving. I’ve been jump-scared by dinosaurs in this game several times.

The first few levels are fine, boring, but beatable. By level 8 or so, the game turns into an unfair mess. Despite the maps being a decent size, the game always spawns you close to your targets. The dinosaurs are also clustered together, and will gang up you, no matter what type of dinosaur they are.

When you spawn, you have about five seconds to shoot the five or so dinosaurs charging towards you. As you can’t hear them, you have no idea where they are coming from. If they are coming from multiple directions, you are pretty much dead. If you upgraded enough, you might be able to run around and dodge a few, but even that doesn’t work sometimes.

The Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs move so fast that you won’t even know what hit you, and while the Velociraptors become 1-hit kills if you upgrade gun damage, the Tyrannosaurs still take multiple hits to kill no matter how high you upgrade.

Let me give you an example. You spawn, and there are five raptors, a Stegosaurus, and three Tyrannosaurs near you. All of them rush towards you in different directions. The Tyrannosaurs are the biggest threat, but if you try to kill one, the other dinosaurs will get you. If you try shooting the raptors, the Tyrannosaurs or the Stegosaurus will get you. You can’t shoot the Stegosaurus because of the carnivores that are about to kill you. If you try to back away, you’ll back into one of the dinosaurs.

It’s a Morton’s Fork, everything you do ends in miserable failure. Most of the levels are luck based, you just have to hope you only spawn near a few dinosaurs, or that they all come in one direction. Upgrading only helps you so much.

Also, do the dinosaurs have some sort of treaty? Why do the herbivores care if I shoot a Velociraptor? Why do the dinosaurs all ignore each other and go straight for me? It’s nonsensical.

I’ve made it to level 37, and I’m giving up there. I’m just getting mobbed within seconds of spawning. I honestly should have given up twenty levels earlier, but I’m stubborn. I’d call this game so bad it’s good, but I can’t because of how unplayable the later levels are.

This is one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

Rating 

1 out of 10

The Mystery Cartoon

Sorry about the lack of posts. I’ve been doing two things recently:

1. Playing Lego Marvel Superheroes 2, which you can expect a review for shortly.

2. Trying to track down a cartoon I watched when I was a kid. This cartoon has seemingly vanished into thin air, and I can’t find it anywhere. It’s like the show has ceased to exist. I’ve posted this in a few other places, but I figured I post this here, in hopes that someone reading this knows what which show I’m talking about:

“The show aired on TVO during the Early 2000s. I saw two episodes, and possibly the opening of a third. I don't think they were very long, and about halfway through, the host of TVO kids would interrupt the show to guess who the culprit was.

The characters were all anthropomorphic animals. The main character was probably a dog who was either a police or a private detective. He had a sidekick, who don't remember anything about, not even what animal he was. He and his sidekick might have been the only recurring characters. I'm going to give a summary of what I remember from each episode, but I could be wrong on some of the details. I'm not even sure that the third episode was of the same show.

Episode 1: I remember the opening of the episode the most as it terrified me. The episode started from the point of view of an inventor walking down a path in a park to his lab (I think), when he hears someone say something from behind him. He turns around to see a fist flying towards his face. He gets knocked out, and the plans for one of his inventions is stolen.

The detective and his sidekick arrived on the scene and talked to the inventor. They also took a look around the crime scene. They talked to the inventor about possible suspects, and he named three, all of them different animals. I don't think the detective ever talked to the suspects, nor did the suspects ever appear. One of the suspects was named "Captain Kangaroo". After this, the TVO kids host interrupts. He says that the culprit isn't Captain Kangaroo and references the old Captain Kangaroo show. After this, the show continued. It was revealed that the culprit was "Captain Kangaroo", as there was a series of tracks leading over a gate or a fence that revealed that the culprit was hopping.

Episode 2: The entire episode took place in a small apartment building. It started with a Porcupine couple arriving at their apartment after their vacation, only to discover that their apartment had been ransacked and that stuff had been stolen from the apartment. The detective and his sidekick arrived, and they talked to the porcupines. Then they talked to the porcupines' neighbors. Eventually they figured out the culprit was a skunk because all the other neighbors were hibernating when the crime happened.

Episode 3: It started with someone admiring a diamond at a museum. The museum's lights suddenly went off, and when they went back on, the diamond was gone. I believe I watched until the detective and his sidekick arrived, but I stopped watching soon after.

I have a list of shows its not: -Sherlock Hound -Dog Tracer -Dog City -Paw Patrol -The Mysteries of Alfred Hedgehog -T.U.F.F Puppy

I seriously have no idea what happened to the cartoon. I even emailed TVO, they couldn't help me either. To me it seems impossible that there's a TVO Kids show that only I watched.”

Review: Danger For Hire (Files #52)

I read part of this book a couple of years ago, but never finished it due to finding it dull. I decided to give the book a second chance, and I still don’t like it very much. 

In this book, Nancy investigates a series of warehouse robberies. All the warehouses were using the same security system, installed by Hayward Security Systems. This is causing the owner of Haywood Security, Tom Hayward, to lose money, and he asks Nancy to investigate the crimes.

Nancy Drew’s characterization is a bit off in this book. She’s shown multiple times getting scared or nervous and ends up trembling at one point. At one point she briefly gets scared by a guy in a Halloween mask. This was the first Files book I read in a while, but I don’t recall Nancy acting like this in other books. She was always more confident then this. It’s not as much of a problem as it is in the current Diaries series, but it’s still noticeable.

Nancy has a new assistant in this book, Cindy Larson, a high school student who’s a fan of hers. Nancy Drew invites Cindy to help her on the case after Cindy follows her to a crime scene. Along the way, Cindy learns that detective work isn’t all excitement and that it’s also more dangerous then she thought. Cindy is the best part of the book, and it’s a shame she didn’t appear in any other books.

At the start of the book, she asks Nancy about the events of “The Suspect Next Door”, and the end of the book contains a preview of a River Heights book, so maybe she made an appearance in that series?

Part of the reason why I found the book so dull the first time I read it is that amount of filler in this book. A lot of the book is Nancy Drew reading newspaper articles and surveilling the warehouse district where the robberies happened. At the start of the book, Nancy tells Cindy that detective work can be quite boring. It seems that was a warning to the reader. 

Brenda Carlton is one of my favourite Files characters, unfortunately, she is pretty much wasted in this book. Despite claiming that she’ll solve the case before Nancy does, she vanishes for most of the second half of the book, only to end up as the villain’s hostage. She does have a decent role in the first half, but it felt like she could have been left out of the book altogether.

Despite the villains seemingly being professional thieves, they aren't very dangerous, and there's not much action in the book. There's an explanation for this, but it's not a very good one. 

Near the end, we discover that the gang of professional thieves was really just Nancy’s employer and a henchman. I really don’t like Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books where their employer turns out to be the bad guy. This sort of twist almost always leads to an anti-climax, and this book is no exception. Instead of Nancy Drew facing off against a gang, she faces off against one person at the end.

Not to mention that the ending involves Brenda Carlton somehow sneaking past a whole ton of police officers. Did she teleport in? Also, I’m not sure why she decided to congratulate Nancy on solving the case right as Nancy is confronting the villain. 

Rating

3 out of 10