The Lost Lands: Dinosaur Hunter

Gamer reviews for The Lost Lands: Dinosaur Hunter

Go Back in Time with The Lost Lands: Dinosaur Hunter

Go Back in Time with The Lost Lands: Dinosaur Hunter

Since the advent of first person shooters, video games across all platforms have sought to solve one riddle: if dinosaurs were alive today, what would it take to efficiently and effectively kill one? Humanity's best guess on mobile comes in the form of The Lost Lands: Dinosaur Hunter- developed by App Store veteran Igor Migun.

The game is a steal at $.99. There are no in-app purchases or ads- it's just your pathetic human ammunition and hand-eye coordination against the most ferocious predators the world has ever known.

The basic gameplay is standard for the genre: walk, aim, shoot to kill. Lost Lands features two modes- a Free Hunting and a Poaching option- both of which offer different rewards for your efforts towards prehistoric decimation. The Free Hunting mode is as close to a tutorial as you will get on the game's mechanics. This mode offers wide open spaces to earn paltry amounts of money for your pro-extinction efforts, which can eventually be used to upgrade your weapons and gear. The Poaching mode focuses the slaughter on a specific species and offers a slightly higher bounty, but on a much tougher animal.

The first thing players will notice upon launching the app is that trying to play the game on any device older than the current generation will be just about impossible. The game is beautiful and the graphics are just about console-perfect, which is amazing if your device is fast enough to support it. Also, the game requires iOS 8.1 to download, so update holdouts will be forced to do their dinosaur-killing elsewhere.

I tried out the game on my First Gen iPad Mini and was able to play in Free Hunting with no problem, but the slightly antiquated device wouldn’t even consider opening the Poaching Missions. iPhone 6 loaded and played the game without a problem and, despite the typical “Too many buttons in a small space” issue that I have with games that cram an entire controller interface onto a touch screen, the game ran perfectly. The Options menu provides the opportunity to scale the graphics down, but since it doesn’t show a selection icon, I literally have no idea if my efforts were successful.

OK, now that the technical stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about the marvelous masterpiece that is Lost Lands. I am going to just say right off that I loved this game. To be honest, I haven’t really played a first person shooter since my Goldeneye days. The wussy girl in me cringes at the thought of using all of the technology that humanity has created to shoot cartoon people that actually look a lot like human beings. But dinosaurs? I can open fire on some dinosaurs.

The Free Hunting mode is a veritable masterpiece of realistic dinosaur hunting and here is why: most of the time you will get completely destroyed. 95% of the killable creatures in this game can end you without even thinking about it. I’m talking about an effortless one hit kill, Death Egg style, while your pathetic human weapons take between 3-12 bullets and guess what hotshot? You left your automatic in your other pants. You might think that you are the tough guy with the ammo and the dino hunting guide, but trust me, you are Dennis freaking Nedry.

Free Hunting takes place in one of two weather situations: an eerily silent fog or a misty thunderstorm. Obviously, both of these settings are less than ideal for being the prey that is hunting a predator, but to make matters worse… velociraptors. So, there you are: wet, weak and vulnerable. You’ve been walking around for what feels like forever, when all of a sudden something stirs in the mist. You can run and try to cover your back, but you don’t know how long you can stay unnoticed or how many are out there. You equip your scope to get a better look. It is a velociraptor. You line up a shot and take it. The camera follows the path of a bullet that grazes the monster’s leg and he vanishes. You think, “Maybe, that killed him. Maybe I win,” but you didn’t hear the pathetic jingle of 40 dollars in change deposited into your Souless Monster Hunter account, did you? No, you didn’t. And now you are dead. That velociraptor will sneak up behind you and kill you in the time it takes you to load your weapon. Your weapon doesn’t auto-aim either. This is real life, Chief. How’s that for a terrible person life lesson?

Missions aren’t better. You are significantly less equipped to fight off a rampaging triceratops (the target of poaching trip #1) than you are a velociraptor. Sure, the terrain is better; the fog has lifted and you can see forever in the bright sunshine. It takes about 6 shots to the head to kill a triceratops, and as soon as you get that first shot off, you will suddenly have a 29 foot long, 8 ton angry dinosaur charging at your soft, squishy, unprotected body.

I’m positive that some of you will complete all of your missions and go on to become valiant and decorated dinosaur warlords. And some of you will die. Because this is prehistoric times and there is no in between.

But, honestly, this game is beautifully done and full of those awful jump scares that the kids are so fond of these days. It is not a game for the Glu Games sadists who just like to watch stuff die. Lost Land is an exercise in kill or be killed and the dinosaurs aren’t going to offer you a choice.

I gave the game 4 stars, because I love it. The expectation and anticipation that comes from not knowing what you will find or if you can kill it even if you do find something is just perfect. I took off one star for two reasons: first of all, you will spend a lot of time walking around and hoping to find something. Granted, some of this wandering contributes to the wow factor of finally finding something, but it ends up making players sink a lot of time into a secondary aspect of the game. Secondly, adding some intermediate rewards in between the nothing that you start with and the everything that you end up with would be a more fun experience for those of us who are just part time dinosaur hunters.

4.0 / 5.0
 
Review by CheerfulStar (Mallary) | Mar 31st 2015

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