We have to admit to not having yet seen The Good Dinosaur, the new Pixar film that first hit US theatres a few days ago. However, there’s no good reason why we can’t still enjoy a game based on the film concept, which we can already imagine lending itself well to a fully free-roaming cartoon platform adventure in the style of that enduring classic, Super Mario 64.
Sadly, with Dino Crossing, you get the impression that the developers either weren’t passionate about what they were doing, or were faced with such a tight deadline that investing time in exploring the various unique gameplay possibilities just wasn’t an option for them. It’s tragic, because the resulting game – basically a rather thoughtless Crossy Road rip-off – is brain-numbingly repetitive.
Not that proceedings are entirely devoid of sparkle. The natural charm of the Pixar properties we all know still largely comes across, while we love the idea of teaming up the film’s main characters, dinosaur Arlo and cave kid Spot, to effectively add to the player’s number of lives. However, nice touches like these remain few and far between. We don’t even need to have seen the film to see that it deserved much better.