Paleo Pines Review | TheXboxHub

So, you want to create a park full of dinosaurs? There are some movies that suggest it might not be a great idea. But Paleo Pines has a different take: what if the dinosaurs were big-eyed cuties who just want you to ride along on their backs? It’s certainly a different version of pre-history. We challenge paleontologists to disprove that you could saddle a dino up and ride it into town.

If you couldn’t tell from that, Paleo Pines is a family-friendly sim that is squarely in the ‘cozy’ bracket. There is no combat, no death or maiming, and precious few time limits outside of a day-night cycle and a calendar that ticks off the days. Its dinosaurs are herbivores and carnivores, but carnivore doesn’t mean much more than requiring different kibble in their troughs. Paleo Pines has all of its claws filed down for younger players to play. 

What might be a surprise is how much of an ‘everything’ sim it is. We expected to be exclusively rearing velociraptors and triceratops, but Paleo Pines is more ambitious than that, and the game-loops encompass so much more. Not only are you looking after your dinos, but you’re managing (and clearing out) the surrounding pens and stables. You need to feed your dinos, which requires crops grown in your fields, and the dinos will bugger off unless you socket a rare gem into their pen. 

And that’s just the loops within your little farm. To plant crops you need seeds, and that means travelling to the local village. But you need coins to buy seed, so you are checking the local job board for quests in the surrounding area. While you’re doing said quests, you will be coming across resources and collectibles in the environment, and you might even spot the odd terrible lizard. These can be observed in your journal, or you can begin the surprisingly long and awkward series of rituals that begins a friendship with one. Get it to follow you, and you have another mouth to feed at the ranch.

We wish we could say that it stops there, but regions can be opened up with specific dinos, and events crop up in the calendar. Paleo Pines is sprawling, almost MMO-like in its systems and potential for investment. Casual players could get lost in this one.

But while there is the potential to get lost, we never felt the compulsion to do so. Paleo Pines may be vast, but it feels oh so empty, and spending time in that space is arduous, boring and fiddly. 

Something that cozy games need as a baseline is convenience. If the stuff you need is hard to get, far-flung and awkward to manage then that word ‘cozy’ starts to drift off into the distance. But Paleo Pines falls into that trap over and over again.

Paleo Pines clearly wants you to work for your gains, so basic stuff is locked to very specific locations in the world. Want to save? Travel back to your homestead. Want to get back there quickly? Nah, we’re not giving you any fast travel. We can understand why, as the game has done such a good job of handing you dinosaurs to ride, but they’re not fast and the world is sprawling. So we get this instead. 

Every single action is a juggle of buttons and interfaces. There is no easy-access radial menu for all your tools: you have to open and search your inventory every time, and when you’re using hoes, watering cans and seeds for farming every day (lest your crops die) then it gets to you. And don’t get us started on the weird mating-like ritual of earning new dinosaurs. Again, we can see why it’s done this way – they want a new dinosaur to be a ‘moment’ – but did we have to work through a five step process that has trial and error baked into it? Inconvenience emanates from everything, from the quest tracker that doesn’t appear on-screen, to a world map that doesn’t zoom out to give you a sense of place.

The rules of the world just aren’t conducive to a relaxed game. Dinosaurs leave you if you don’t socket a rare gem into their pens, and in the meantime they’re going to be high-maintenance. You will need to pet them, feed them and love them so that they don’t ditch you for a more loving dinosaur owner. That’s not exactly what we’d expect from a game of this type.

But the killer for us was the game’s stamina system. It’s attached to all of your dinos and your avatar, too. You can do barely ten actions per person or dino before they get knackered and can do nothing else. Farming, clearing rubbish and even sprinting, for Alan Grant’s sake, is all tied to this system, so you have the deadening choice of making progress OR being able to sprint. That’s not a choice we needed to have to make. So much of this should have been baseline.

If there was more in the world, this might have been softened a tad. But the world of Paleo Pines feels empty. You can ride your dino for whole minutes without seeing anything to see or pick up. Resources are tiny and sparkle with an ineffectual glimmer, so you only really spot them when you’re close, and they’re rare and in the corners of this vast world anyway. We gave up on them until we realised, painfully, that we couldn’t progress through the game that way.

Explore the world, and the day-night cycle moves to evening, and you will want to be home but lack the sprint or fast-travel to get there. So you’re a lonesome traveller, trudging home in the dark, desperate to get to that save point so you can at least stop playing the damn thing. Thank goodness for Quick Resume: what did we do before we had it?

We’re being a mite unkind, mostly because these issues seem so obvious from playing Paleo Pines. We can close our eyes and imagine what a convenient, faster-paced and densely packed version of the game might look like. It’s not difficult to imagine at all: all of the component parts are here, they just needed to be drawn closer together and made easier to access.

That game would be a little gem. Because watching your paddocks fill with dinosaurs is a joy, and the way the systems feed each other is clever and could – feasibly – drag you from one in-game day to the next. We could imagine playing the hell out of that game, and our kids would too. The dinosaurs are cute as a button, and our kids wanted to get more of them. But they weren’t going to hurdle the infuriations and inaccessibility to get to them. That ended up being daddy’s job.

Somehow, Paleo Pines has managed to make dinosaurs dull. They’ve achieved it through a cozy sim that makes every one of its many systems as inconvenient to use as possible. We just wanted to catch ’em all, but Paleo Pines hands you too many chores and makework before you can even get close.

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• Source: https://www.thexboxhub.com/paleo-pines-review/