Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

A month ago Telltale Games released a new Jurassic Park adventure game with a totally not catchy title. They call it Jurassic Park: The Game. Yeah, that’s easy to search the internet for…

Anyways I gave the game a shot, just because I felt obligated from a Dinosaur Cowboys point of view. The game is really not my style, and I’d best describe it as “light adventure”. Keep that in mind.
Basically to succeed at various scenes you have to press a key/mouse combo in a certain order. For example if you are falling down a slope you press Enter right as you reach a tree branch and your character will grab on. Similarly you repeatedly press Spacebar to back away from a menacing dinosaur. Don’t misunderstand me though, you don’t have a bunch of arbitrary actions you can perform, the game basically prompts you to press different keys as the scene progresses. If you fail enough times you might die or “lose” the scene, otherwise the story might branch a tiny bit.
There are also some basic dialog options with characters, plus some fun non-key combo scenes (like searching for a Triceratops with binoculars). You can also search around scenes at some point, for example to look into the trees to get more info, or examine footprints, etc. But in general there is only a single “correct” path to take, so the investigation is really just time filler.
In general though I think the game is better suited to children or people who really love Jurassic Park. The story is interesting since it basically happens parallel to the first movie, ie: you hear references to “the fancy paleontologists who came in to the park” (aka the characters from the movie), but you play a mercenary more focused on recovering the dinosaur embryos.
I haven’t gotten that far into the game because it didn’t really entice me to keep playing. The scenes can be frustrating sometimes as you try over and over to get the timing right, and each time you fail you’re forced to sit through the same cinematic.
The graphics are alright and have a unique half-cartoony style that is evident from any of the screenshots with people in them.
I’d say the game has come a long way from early adventure titles like Hugo’s House of Horrors, but it still fails to get me excited to keep playing.

Anyways yeah, still waiting for someone to remake Red Dead Redemption or Call of Juarez but with Dinosaurs. Until then the market for dinosaur games is rather light. Jurassic Park: The Game does try a new approach, but it’s not the approach for me. There is always Dino D-Day though, haha.