Dinosaur'us

Dinosaurs have been making a bit of a comeback recently, what with Jurassic Park, Godzilla and Disney's most recent effort, Dinosaur – which, bizarrely enough, featured our extinct, scaly friends chatting amongst themselves.

EA must have thought that the dinos deserved a bit of good fortune after their one-sided argument with a vast meteorite a while ago, and so they appear to have tried to combine them with a slightly less prehistoric phenomenon – Pokémon. This means that Dinosaur'us is basically Pokémon with scales and claws.

Use The Fossil

As in the Pokémon games, you have to stagger about, waiting to be set upon by hideous monsters, and then kick the scales off them, using a (bizarrely limited) combination of tail slashes and claw attacks. If you kill all the enemies in a sector, you can move on to the next. This is done by lurching across badly-designed platform landscapes, or taking part in subgames (like steering your dino across a river on the back of a turtle) and these sections are where the main problems with the game lie. Are right-thinking gamers supposed to believe that a 25-ton carnivore, with a head the size of a car, is able to skip merrily across moving platforms? It seems unlikely to us!

Dinosaur'us has some nice features – like the option to name your dino and to train it up quite easily – but small design flaws are present throughout the game. The main sprite is simply too big for most of the platform sections, and if you choose the option to 'run away' from a battle, you have to start the current area all over again!

If you want to buy a monster combat game with RPG elements, get a Pokémon title – this one just hasn't been thought through well enough to top the mighty Pikachu and his collectable pals.