If shooting waves of dinosaurs with some of your best buddies sounds like fun, then you should probably start working on a time machine right now so you can actually travel to the Pleistocene and have at it. You’re much, much more likely to have fun doing that than you are playing Orion: Dino Beatdown , a broken, ugly looking, poorly designed mess of a game that has about as much to do with entertainment as bathroom-stall scrawling does with poetry.

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The concept here is that you and up to four others (you can play solo, but that might as well be impossible for the difficulty) defend a “generator” base against waves of AI dinosaurs who are trying to destroy it and then kill you, not necessarily in that order. Apart from the fact that that Dino Beatdown gives you virtually no indication of what does what, where your teammates are, or pretty much anything, it’s also terribly balanced. Enemies can kill you almost instantly with no indication that you’re being injured, weapons are either pathetically weak or ludicrously over-powered, teammates are not encouraged to work together, and classes aren’t designed with complementary skillsets.Dino Beatdown’s respawn system presents its own problems. When you die -- which will happen often and unexpectedly – you must either have somehow accrued a huge war chest to pay for a respawn or wait for your teammates to fight off the current wave and, if it’s been damaged, repair the generator. This can take five or even ten minutes, depending on how early you die and how lucky your teammates get. Since a bug prevents you from observing other players there is literally nothing to do during this downtime other than stare at the ground.Other bugs all but break the game entirely. Cover is of little use, as large dinosaurs can clip right through it and kill you in a single bite. Finding a game to join in the first place is nearly impossible, due not only to the predictable dearth of gamers willing to waste their time tooling around in Dino Beatdown’s awfully designed and even worse looking maps, but also to bugs which prevent connections at all. However, when you do manage to get into an open game, you can bank on terrible lag and framerate issues, and a good chance of encountering another bug that prevents you from joining your teammates as anything but a spectator, despite open slots for players.Graphics are just God-awful, as everything from jerky animations to blocky gun textures make them look like they were drawn by actual dinosaurs. The background music is wildly inappropriate for the setting, and is wont to put you in mind of what they play in the elevators of large office buildings rather than a fight for your life. And forget about sound. No, really: forget about it – there isn’t any. Dinosaurs make no noise at all – let alone terrifying battle screeches -- guns all sound the same (a pathetic, tinny “boink”), and the bizarre, Unreal Tournament-wannabe narrator sounds like he was recorded in a karaoke bar.Yes, you do get to play co-operatively with people, and I guess that’s sort of a plus. But unlike, say Left 4 Dead or Borderlands, there is no incentive to co-operate with your teammates at all. In fact, you’re usually better off getting as far from them as possible and just hiding out to save your own skin. Dinosaur AI will instantly prioritize anyone who shoots in its general direction, so letting your teammates draw aggro while picking off enemies from a distance is your best bet. Helping them gets you nowhere; a great example of this in action is the way Dino Beatdown treats vehicles. You can have a guy on a turret and a guy driving (and, bizarrely, a guy in a passenger’s seat with nothing to do at all), but the guy driving gets absolutely no reward for the enemies killed by the turret guy. Nothing. So why, when earning money from killing enemies is the only way to afford upgrades, would anyone want to team up and drive a vehicle for someone else? That, writ large, is everything that Dino Beatdown does wrong.