Roarr! Jurassic Edition

For as big and ferocious as the Tyrannosaurus Rex is, it sure has been in a lot of terrible movies. Between Dinosaur Island, Theodore Rex and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, there are almost too many options to choose from. But while I may have trouble deciding on what the worst movie is, I can tell you with complete confidence that Roarr! The Adventures of Rampage Rex is the worst dinosaur game I've ever played. From the paper thin gameplay to the aggressively bad graphics to boring city destruction, this game is a step backwards in every single way possible.

On paper, Roarr! The Adventures of Rampage Rex (also known as Roarr! Jurassic Edition) should have been fun. It's a game about a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex fighting aliens while knocking down cities, it's basically Jurassic Park meets King of the Monsters. But don't let that admittedly awesome description fool you, because this debut release from Born Lucky Games is an abject failure in every sense of the word.

This is a game about Sue, a sleeping T-Rex who is awakened by an alien invasion. Not interested in letting those space creatures control Earth, Sue uses her tiny arms and massive tail to stomp all over the aliens. In other words, it's a 3D brawler where we mash the attack buttons until everybody on screen is dead, move to a new part of the level and then mash the buttons some more. Rinse and repeat.

This would be fine if the 3D brawling was fun, but it's not. There are only a couple of multi-hit combos to learn, and most of them are completely useless. There's no technique here and the enemies don't maneuver in interesting ways. The truth is, you can spend most of the time hitting one button and make it to the boss. About the only cool thing you can do is unleash a powerful special attack that destroys everything around you.

Speaking of which, the way you charge up that special move is by destroying the cities, buildings and trees. The game basically rewards Sue for being as destructive as possible, which is a pretty cool concept. But don't get too excited, because knocking down buildings just means walking into them. They fly out of the way like Monopoly pieces, never in a way that even comes close to resembling something satisfying. How could a game about fighting aliens and stomping on cities be this boring?

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It doesn't help that the graphics look like they are from a first-generation Jaguar game. That's not hyperbole. When I first booted the game up, I was immediately taken back to the hours I put into Iron Soldier back in 1994. The buildings are all very simple shapes, the backgrounds are low-polygon and ground is always flat and mostly a single color. And there's a reason why everything is flat, and that's because Sue has a bad tendency to float in the air. No, seriously.

In almost every way, Roarr! feels like a huge step backwards. It's not that I was expecting it to look like War of the Monsters on the PlayStation 2, but it doesn't even look as good as King of the Monsters on the Neo Geo. And then there's the music, which doesn't even have the good sense to loop. A lot of the songs will come on and have a lot of promise, but then all of them end in this weirdly abrupt way. It's not that they get to a natural conclusion and fade out, they just stop. It's almost as if they forgot to include the full song. The six stages are all fairly long and full of multiple fights, so it makes no sense to feature music that lasts no longer than 90 seconds. It's just another one of the many bad decisions found in Roarr!

At its best, Roarr! The Adventures of Rampage Rex is a mindless beat 'em up where you mash buttons until all the aliens are dead. Unfortunately, that premise alone isn't enough to make up for the horrendous graphics, the simplistic gameplay, the lame enemy designs, the frustratingly short music samples and the aggressively bad bosses. And even if you can get over all of that, you're still going to be left with a boring brawler that is no fun to play. Roarr! shouldn't have been released in this state.