Enemy Scoot's Review on Orion: Dino Beatdown

        Oh, this game... This game is exactly what you think it would be. Trying to survive hordes of dinosaurs attacking you, your friends, and your base while you shoot at them with fancy cool weapons in beautiful, large environments.

        The game offers 3 classes. A sneaky one that gives you a cloak, a healy one that gives you a heal gun, and a jetpacky one that gives you a jetpack. From my experience, the jetpack class is by far the very best, as it allows you to avoid getting hit, and lets you jet pack to a safe spot to recover from damage that the nasty dinos inflict on you.

        Speaking of dinosaurs, I've only ever seen 3 different kinds in the game during my 4 hours of playing, which is a bit dissapointing. There's your run-of-the-mill swarm mob, the Raptor, which isn't much of a threat alone, due to its low health, but can do some damage if you get swarmed by them. Next, there's the pterodactyls. These things are damn annoying. They pick you up, and you can easily escape them by meleeing them, and if you have a jetpack you can negate any fall damage when being dropped, but they have a lot of health. By a lot I mean, using up at least 10 clips with your standard pistol to take them down, a lot. Then comes in these things, the T-Rexes. They can instantly kill you at melee range, move rather quickly, can throw extremely damaging rocks at you when far away, and have a seemingly bottomless health pool. Killing just one T-Rex without using a vehicle or lots of help from friends can take ages, and usually results in dying.

        On the subject of dying, the death and respawn mechanics in this game are just plain awful. When you die, you get stuck in a crappy spectator mode, with the edges of the screen tinted red, and the camera tilted at an angle. You're stuck like this until either a) Everyone dies and you all fail the world and start over again, b) Your team finishes the current wave of dinos or, c) Your team finishes the wave, but the generators fail and then the remaining people have to go find a new base. And when you respawn? You lose all the items and upgrades you previously bought using your credits, which are obtained from killing dinos. It can get really infuriating if you manage to save up 10,000 credits for one of the top-tier guns, only to get instantly eaten by a T-Rex moments later.               

        The generator mechanic is a dumb one, too. The generator at every base powers the stations that give you back ammo and health, and that let you buy and upgrade stuff. For some reason, these dumb dinosaurs are smart enough to target this generator and will destroy it pretty quickly. Repairing it requires someone to stand by it and hold E for 10 seconds straight or so. It may not sound bad, but all the dinosaurs will then proceed to attack this person. Okay, so, what if you just wait til the end of a wave to fix the generator? Well, between waves you get a wonderful break time of 10 seconds. Yeah. Only 10 seconds to frantically rush to the generator and try to fix it before the dinos come.

        Also, at the time of writing, this game is EXTREMELY buggy. To the point where you may fail to respawn, servers will not work, dinosaurs glitch through walls, your fps are affected by ping, poor optimization, icons not displaying correctly, jumpy animations, and more. This is worse than Bethesda games at launch.

        Now to lighten all those negatives out a bit, I do have to say that the environments are just amazing. You have a few different worlds to choose from to play on, but they're all gigantic and look very nice. The guns also feel very fun to fire, and the animations are good, although very very jumpy online.

        All in all, this is a fun game to play non-seriously with a couple of friends when you're bored, although the difficulty is unforgiving due to poor mechanics and bugs (hopefully the bugs will get fixed), and the gameplay can be pretty lacking when you're sitting there, forced to spectate your friend who is sitting in a building slowly gunning down a bunch of T-Rexes with his basic pistol for 20 minutes.

        Is it worth your money? It really depends if you've got $10 to spare and don't have much else to do. Hopefully with time, the devs will fix the bugs and mechanics, and balance the game a bit, and maybe one day this game will be one that is reveled for dinosaur-y goodness, and not looked down upon for its weaknesses.