➤ The Raptor is different: you look at him, and he stares at you in turn 🎮

If you thought that everything had been said about the Second World War, get ready to be proved wrong: we drove the Nazis back from Moscow and Stalingrad, from Italy and France and from the Ardennes, by sea and by land, even under water, both in before the third person. Maybe from above or at the command of an elite unit, commandos, even on a chessboard. We stopped their crazy plans to build super soldiers, to bring the dead back to life, and possibly to build the Death Star, invade Kuwait and shoot JF Kennedy, all the while discovering that they were the ones who killed Lincoln. But never, and let us stress never, had we seen the Nazis march side by side with the dinosaurs to conquer the world: as they say, there is always a first time.

God destroys dinosaurs, the Nazis recreate them!

The story behind Dino d-day it is probably the greatest merit of the game itself. The title was originally designed as a mod for Half Life 2 (based mainly on Day of Defeat Source) and only recently marketed via steam at the not exactly indifferent price of 19.90 euros. The game tells that in 1942, in full invasion of Africa, the Nazis somehow managed to clone, train and arm none other than ... dinosaurs!

The Raptor is different: you look at him, and he stares at you in turn

While waiting for a single-player mode that explains the background of this mysterious and disturbing genetic aberration, the only information we have on the prehistoric horde is given by the newspapers and the messages reported during the loading screens between games. , which, reproduced in the classic style of the time, emphasize the situation in the most grotesque way possible - an explanatory leaflet depicting a T-Rex gripping a woman resembling Marylin Monroe between the paws - giving an even more hilarious to the already absurd concept of the title.

Said this, Dino d-day for now it looks like a classic multiplayer team shooter up to 24 players with seven traditionally mirrored maps and different objectives that, under high-sounding names and descriptions, hide the usual routine made up of team deathmatch, king of the hill and destroy / defend the fort . Although a good breath of fresh air is given by a particular map in which the final battle will be between the allies and a giant triceratops on which a cannon has been mounted.

The dirty dozen

As promised in the body of the review, here's a quick overview of the classes featured in the game:
ALLIES
Cap Jack Hardgrave: excellent example of a hybrid between assailant and sniper, armed with a Garand rifle and a 1911 colt, he has as a special ability the possibility of going into berserker mode after killing 3 enemies in a row, increasing the damage dealt and reducing that immediately.
Cpl Joe Spencer: machine gunner and scout equipped with the deadly tommy gun and bags of explosives, excellent class for the assault and effective against raptors due to the high rate of fire of the machine gun: his obvious flaw is accuracy.
Cpt Nighel Crossley: English sapper armed with a shotgun capable of penetrating the thickest armor and a lethal rocket launcher, he too lacks precision and reload times.
Ilona Viche: Soviet sniper equipped with a very precise Mosin Nagant and a revolver, she has the special ability of the bait, that is rabbits capable of attracting the attention of enemy velociraptors.
Camille Brun: partisan from Gran Canaria, she is armed with the sten submachine gun, the most accurate of those in the game, which makes her lethal for velociraptors or enemy soldiers. The low caliber makes it unsuitable for dealing with large dinosaurs. His special ability is to throw medium packs.
Jacob Frank: Dino's Jewish Bear D-Day: His deadly Browning automatic rifle can fire in both bursts and single shots, making him a great mix of stormtrooper and gunner. He is also armed with a sawn-off shotgun which. The only drawback of both is the long recharge time.
JURASSIC AXIS / BERLIN:
Hptm Kurt Streiker: German base soldier and hybrid between sniper and attacker armed with mauser k98 and mp40 submachine gun. The slow rate of fire makes the mauser less than its American counterpart Garand, while the MP40 lacks the power of other weapons. Good grenades that he carries around.
Olt Hissman: typical sniper with an infallible K98 with optics, he can also launch pterodactyls armed with kamikaze-style explosives on the field.
Doctor Wolfgang Von Graf: the power of the Nazi doctor does not come so much from being able to launch medi packs that can also cure dinosaurs, as from the powerful MP44 that he carries with him, which makes him a devastating assault soldier.
Raptor: the first of the dinosaurs usable by the Nazis is the classic velociraptor we have known since Jurassik Park: very fast and able to make great leaps and to kill an enemy in a few moments with a bite to the throat, it pays for all this with the few points of life.
Desmatosuchus: very powerful armored dinosaur carrying a cannon on its back. It has incredible firepower and an almost embarrassing rate of fire, moreover, it is very resistant to bullets thanks to the armored scales that cover it. Fortunately it is clumsy and slow.
Dilophosaurus: medium-sized carnivore, he can hit enemies with his claws or charge them with his head down, moreover, he can grab between the jaws of sheep or directly opponents to hurl at those who have the courage to face him. dimensions, which make it an attractive target for any shooter, even if the leather is quite resistant.

Let's extinguish them again!

Maintaining the obvious parody verve of the title, even the classes mainly represent the stereotypes typical of the world conflict, with an eye to American propaganda films of the 60s: there are in fact six characters per faction, each with weapons, skills, name and even unique history. We go from the usual American to John Wayne, with a Thompson machine gun and a great desire to harm the French partisan armed with Sten and medi packs, to the English sapper with a David Niven mustache, with the Soviet sniper and the big Jew, big and armed with sawed-off shotgun and heavy machine gun, with even physically an eye on the mythical Jewish Bear of the Inglourious Basterds.

On the German side we have the doctor armed with an assault machine gun, the sniper and the inevitable simple soldier equipped with a carbine and machine gun, to which the great novelties of the game are combined: the dinosaurs. Leaving the details on the various characters in the appropriate box, let's analyze the impact of this mixture in the gameplay. Impact that, in addition to the subtle irony of each comment of the various avatars, also highlights a basic imbalance that signals how the game will need various tricks and patches to bring everything to a fair level of parity. Mind you, firing bursts of machine guns in the face of raptors is always fun, as is grabbing opponents in the jaws and hurling them at their comrades, or shooting them with the artillery piece mounted on the back of a large desmatosuchus, but to the player. more experienced will not be able to escape some problems of too powerful or precise weapons (the German MP44), of excessively armored dinosaurs (the aforementioned desmatosuchus), of markedly trivial objectives in some maps, which penalize too much the attacker / defender on duty, or of subdued classes compared to others - the Allied Engineer, for one thing, but even the German Private does not make sense when you have the best-armed medic and the sniper with a better rifle.

However, some ideas for fun are not lacking and, at least in the first hours of the game, the feeling will be that of being faced with a mixture of Jurassik Park and Indiana Jones in his amalgamation of the features of both films with a marked and irreverent irony to the right point. The problems will come later, when the seven maps have all been seen and all the variations of the objectives have been tried, the routine will begin to become repetitive, so much so that, less than a month after release, after the initial full house, you already notice a noticeable decrease in the number of players on the servers.

Jurassic technique

Speaking of the technical aspect of Dino D Day, we know that we cannot expect too much from a title based on an engine by now as old as the Source, especially when it is not Valve to get our hands on it, and in fact in the face of a satisfactory general figure it is not possible to ignore the various shortcomings both in terms of texture and general detail, both in the characters and especially in the interiors of homes and environments. Instead, the three-dimensional models of the dinosaurs, the exteriors and some light effects, especially the flames, are improved.

Fortunately, the frenzy of the clashes often overshadow the lack of graphics, while leaving the player satisfied with what moves (and dies) on the screen. Regarding the servers, there is a good general stability, with very rare crashes often motivated by important reasons such as updates or the like. In two weeks, a couple of patches have been released, which gives hope for a continuous commitment of the developers to update their product, which still lacks an already advertised single-player and who would appreciate a few more maps and dinosaurs, perhaps that T -Rex peeping in trailers but not seen in the final game, and we know that a dinosaur product will never be such without a nasty Rex chasing after the protagonists. The sound effects of the various weapons are good, recognizable from each other by the blast sounds (knowing if the one who shoots on the ground floor of the house on which you are placed as snipers is the machine gun of an ally or an enemy helps a lot) and the voices of the characters, even their comments and the accompanying music played on those of the great American blockbusters hit the spot.

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If there were no dinosaurs, Dino d-day would be one of the many online shooters about World War II. Although there are dinosaurs and acknowledging the genius of their idea and the clever irony with which it is carried out, however, the game remains one of the many online shooters. The different classes can be interesting for a while and the maps are on average interesting, at least until they get bored, also because they are quite small and in a couple of games you will already know all the secrets. Twenty euros these days are not a trifle, but the fact that the single player will arrive and that there is already talk of new maps and additional dinosaurs bodes well. Of course, when these things will arrive remains a mystery. Until then we are in the presence of a game that can entertain but that will soon be set aside, at least pending the new promised additions. In short, that of shooters is an ultra-inflated market and there is much better for much less ...