When I was a kid, I used to make all of my toys play together. Every figurine, buildable, and play set was subject to my imagination and the crazy things I could come up with. The concept for Dino Frontier sounds like something straight out of an eight year-old’s mind: The Old West meets Jurassic Park. Cowboys and dinosaurs. With the power of virtual reality, Dino Frontier plays like an interactive miniature set, one filled with saloons, bandits, and prehistoric creatures. It’s a distinction that I noted when I saw the game back at PSX last year.
Dino Frontier is a sim builder. As Big Mayor, a hilariously appropriate name given my godlike nature looming over the town, I used the Move controllers to simulate hands, building the town up from an empty plot and helping my settlers harvest resources. It’s the classic gameplay loop of a simulation builder game, but virtual reality makes it feel more like playing with an Old West play set, one that got mixed in with the plastic dinosaurs. Instead of separating out the different toys, someone’s imagination said “let’s put a cowboy on the back of a T. Rex and see what happens.” Being able to zoom into the environment and become the same size as your settlers, or zoom out to a bird’s eye view is something I can’t do with my toys though, and it’s a delight to see the detail they’ve put into the objects and animations at a macro level. Welcome to Jurassic Park
As you I ...