Jurassic Fantasy - a review by JubalGame Type: Indie/Commercial
Genre: Maze/Adventure/RPG
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1342220/Jurassic_Fantasy/| Graphics rating: |  |
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I paid 39 pence for this indie game, and I felt I got at least sixty pence worth of enjoyment out of it, so I'd say reasonable value was obtained considering that. The basic pitch is 8-bit Jurassic Park with wizards, you wander around a map fighting dinosaurs to make money and then finding occasional shops and magic stones - finding all five stones completes the game. I took 60 mins playing through the game without major issues, but then looked up how to find the final stone (the top left one out of the five) from someone else's speedrun video because I'd searched around the map including circumnavigating the island on my raft and was getting a bit bored.
In general it's fine, mostly it's more of a maze game than anything else, the combat is just "run away and shoot magic balls at stuff", and there are a few shops and special places scattered around with some more powerful items and enemies available in other parts of the map. Graphics are limited but that's very much part of the idea. The range of enemies is fun (including a couple of small things I was unsure about, triceratops, parasauralophus, velociraptors, plesiosaurs, ambient pteranodons overhead, and a you-can-probably-guess-what for the final boss fight). As the combat mechanics are quite limited there's a limited differentiation between the creatures in the game, though generally the smaller, faster enemies are more dangerous: the combat is not especially challenging as long as you keep upgrading your stats. Because of this, the main interest is in exploring the map and seeing new areas as you go.
In terms of what can be improved, there are a number of quality-of-life additions that would really help. Tagging showing help to the H key would have made it quicker to find it at the start. I did not initially realise that the raft was a raft, as opposed to a crate, so I think tagging the items in the shops with the name of the item would also be helpful. I think it would've been cool if the minimap had filled in with some of the rough idea of the terrain as you "discovered" it, too: the maze element is sort of nice but clashes a bit with the RPG side overall.
In terms of expansions or future games, I'd have liked to see a bit more world building and some more NPCs to interact with: it seems like it might be quite fun to have some more ambient people and houses you just walked up to and had them give you something very minimal and maybe complained about all the dinosaurs or something. I liked the "end boss" section a lot, that was a nice touch, but yes, generally a bit more leaning into the RPG elements would have been good from my perspective. Also, the lack of ankylosaurus was very sad and it would be nice to see those in future.
