izigame.me

Words cannot express how deeply I wish I didn't feel the need to give this rating. I've followed Paleo Pines since it was a concept on Tumblr, both because of my love for farming sims and because I have been a dinosaur nerd since I first went to the museum and saw the skeleton of one of those amazing animals. I had high hopes for Paleo Pines- because honestly, how many games are out there with dinosaurs in them that don't depict them as rabid, wild-eyed, scaly, Hollywood horror monsters for you to simply shoot? Paleo Pines is different, and for that at least I'll wholly give credit. But unfortunately, in a desert of FPS dinosaur shoot em ups, this poor oasis...has stale waters.
Pros:
-Dinosaurs. Full stop, that's the sentence, there are dinosaurs and they're adorable and they're in a game where I can pet them and make little houses for them and feed them treats like particularly spoiled cats.
-Dinosaur designs. To be more serious, the different patterns and colors are an utter delight. Imagine how excited I was when I was crossing the bridge to get to town and ran face first into an albino psittacosaurus? The noise I made could have roused the dead with how excited I was.
-The mechanics are well thought out, that there are different dinosaurs that can help you with different farm tasks is imaginative and fun, and the fact that I can bring multiple dinosaurs with me on any given outing so I can just hop off of one and directly onto another without backtracking across the map? A+!
-The world itself, though rather large and somewhat empty, is still beautiful.
Cons:
-Missing tutorials and information... there were an alarming number of times where I was truly at a loss for how to complete a task or how to get a dinosaur to perform its actions. I had to google the psittacosauruses, was sent to reddit, and from reddit, was sent to the Paleo-Pines tumblr, where I finally found out that the core mechanic of the psittacosauruses, one of the first three dinosaurs you encounter ingame...cannot be used until you complete several quests for an NPC that (for me at least) did not show up until the Paleo-Pines version of summer)
-Inventory size... You get a 4x4 inventory. You cannot expand it. Different quality crops take up multiple inventory spaces. Your dinosaurs cannot help carry extra things.
-The NPCs. Characterwise they're alright, but they don't have schedules- or at least, not consistent ones that you can find in-game. Different NPCs spend different days in different locations. The Seeds Grandma will spend an entire day at her seed stall and cannot be found at her house at any point, but then the next day the opposite will be true and she will be at her house and will not come within a mile of her stall. This especially will make quests where you have to deliver an item to a person while they're at a certain location even more of a pain in the tail.
-The NPCs continued, this game does not have a quantifiable friendship system from what I can tell? I may be wrong about this though, which is why I put it in a separate bullet.
-You can't cook at your house. I didn't even know there was a cooking mechanic until I happened upon a cooking pot by a lake while digging for clovers. I still have no idea how to cook, trying to click on it just prompts my character to say I should learn how to cook.
Special Con because I still can't quite wrap my head around this:
-This is a fantasy/farming sim... that you cannot craft in. You can find all the wood, fiber, and stone in the world but lambed if you know how to use them to make a fence post. IE, THE most common item you need for your farm, to make paddocks for you dinosaurs. So much of my money has been spent not on seeds or equipment, but on fencing and troughs.
Look; truthfully, nothing in the world would make me happier than the devs making me eat my words and improving the game to a degree that I'd be ashamed to have ever doubted them. I want that with every fiber of my being. So, if in the future, I need to come back to this review and chow down, I will do so with unfettered, unabashed JUBILANCE. But for now... the price tag just does not feel like it quite matches the game itself.