Go Home Dinosaurs is a cute little tower defense game that’s being developed by Fire Hose Games. If you were at PAX last year, or have perused PlayStation Network, you may have seen their first game, Slam Bolt Scrappers (which I suggest you grab the demo to check it out).
I sat down and played a few levels at PAX Prime. The aim of the game is to use your army of mammals to stop the dinosaurs from taking your steaks from the grill at the end of a preset path.
You start out a level with a gopher that moves around the map. It can hurl bombs at the dinosaurs and more importantly, harvest coconuts from palm trees that pop up around the map. The coconuts are the converted into money. The more coconuts you let a tree produce, the more money you get.
Once you’ve gathered enough money, you turn that into your fighting force. Each different turret has a different attack ability and a different shape. I had access to guerrilla fighters that can attack a certain radius, a laser turret that fired at two directions, and a big magnet that pulls a meteor out of the sky into the dinosaurs. It’s obvious to me now that it’s a sly joke on extinction that I didn’t immediately get while playing. The real strategy lies in both stopping the dinosaurs, and fitting each turret together.
Speaking of jokes, you’ll be able to see in the gallery below that characters will sometimes speak up in the game and make both silly and referential jokes. While the game itself was lighthearted, I didn’t completely laugh out loud until I saw some of these. Even though there were a lot that popped up in the demo, and none repeated in my time playing, I hope the team adds more of this humor to the game.
The levels were quick, and weren’t too difficult. While this was a demo they put together for PAX, it was still fun and funny, so I won’t hold those shortcomings against them. The demo does show that, even though the game is in early production, the graphics are very clean and vibrant. I couldn’t really hear the sound over the hustle and bustle of the show floor, so I can’t give any impressions on that.
Eitan Gilnert, the president of the studio, took the time to talk to me about the game and how it came to be. The story goes that the folks at Fire Hose were tinkering around with different aspects of Slam Bolt Scrappers after the game shipped. One of the developers slapped the puzzle piece aspect together with a tower defense function. After seeing that this was a fun twist on the genre, the studio as a whole decided to turn this little project into their next game.
Go Home Dinosaurs will be released for PC and they’re looking at console and iPhone releases as well. A release date is not set, but I hope to see more of the game in the future!
