Playtime: 1h45m (tutorial + 1 mission)

Played: 2025

Intro

DINO is a real-time strategy game. You gather resources, build buildings, train an army and build defenses to defeat incoming waves that may come from any direction.

Review

I was curious about this because it is marked as a Tower Defense game on Steam and it's in this month's Humble Choice.

As it turns out, this isn't a TD game at all. There are only 3 defensive buildings that can damage enemies, most damage comes from your army which you control directly. So it's just a plain old RTS. Very similar to AOE1, just much more primitive. There are only about 10 combat units and research is very basic. Also there are no factions to choose from, you're always the same one.

Maybe young people don't know what an RTS is? In any case, there is a small twist. Enemies don't have a base that produces stuff, they spawn from the edge of the map at certain points. It's similar to survival missions like fighting the giant ants in Red Alert. So basically, it's a truly terrible version of The Riftbreaker. An infinitely better game with expansive research, dozens of deployable defenses, actually interesting enemies, etc.

The only thing DINO really has going for it is that you can give orders and start construction while paused. Every strategy game should have that, it vastly improves accessibility.

Conclusion

If you want to play an extremely basic RTS that's worse than AOE1, get this. If you want to construct massive defenses and fight hordes of awesome monsters, get The Riftbreaker.