If you’re like me, you love the old school NES days. Who doesn’t enjoy 8-bit platformers where you walk right and destroy anything that comes into your path- that era just had a wonderfully delightful way of taking bizarre ideas and making them possible. Dinocide is no different, only it’s coming out nearly 30 years later than you’d think.
Developed by Atomic Torch, who previously worked on the critically acclaimed game VoidExpanse, Dinocide is a single-player platformer set in a prehistoric fantasy world. The caveman protagonist must save his partner who’s been taken by the Dinosaur God. Using the help of your dinosaur friends, you hop on their backs and dash off to the rescue. With the help of your brothers-in-short-arms, you can jump higher, run faster, dive underwater and fly through the sky. You’ll travel across many lands, taking on not just dinosaurs, but ‘weird creatures.’
Dinocide promises to deliver a non-linear storyline, by offering different routes through several different environments, including jungles, lava caves, oceans and icy plains. The game also features a pretty unique way of handling health and time, by placing them in the same bar- which slowly ticks away between hits.
It would seem that games like Joe & Mac are heavily inspiring not just the gameplay, but the fact that you choose your own path. In response to one commenter on their YouTube trailer, the developers have stated that Adventure Island 2 on the Nintendo Entertainment System was “one of our inspirations for this game.†They reveal on their dev blog that “We created Dinocide under strong influence of classical NES platformers and we want to invoke the same feeling of that old console gaming.â€
The developers also have a free demo available through their site, that allows you to play three different levels that were built outside of the main game. The original levels should give gamers an idea about Dinocide’s main mechanics and the story surrounding the experience.
AtomicTorch was founded in 2013, and enjoy making games that are true to old-school roots, while making them accessible to all gamers. The company had great success with their prior game, by releasing a build of it on their website, and asking the community to help influence the direction of the game to its final state. They’re hoping to fully release Dinocide soon, so if you want to help, pick up the free demo and leave your thoughts.
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