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Usually when a game is released at a bargain bin price, it’s for a reason. Thus is the situation with Dinotopia. The Dinotopia franchise itself has been around for quite a while, jumping mediums from books to television, and now, a video game… a poorly made, boring video game.

The game puts you in the role of Drake Gemeni, an inhabitant of Dinotopia, and twin brother of Jacob Gemini. When the game starts off, you are treated to a rather boring small sequence of a man being attacked and killed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This man ends up being Drake and Jacobs father. Now with his father dead and gone, Drake must fulfill a promise he once made to his father: to protect Dinotopia, the land his father loved so much.

To set things up, you start off with a quick fighting tutorial. Once you finish the rather shallow training, you’ll quickly notice that the game is one big fetching quest. You’ll spend nearly the entire game running errands and looking for items for NPC characters. This very evident element makes the game dull and boring almost right from the beginning, as any fun that you may have once had will be long destroyed by the repetitive gameplay.

Gameplay in Dinotopia is made up mostly of on-foot running around. Thankfully though, there’s plenty of combat to be had, though the fighting system is shallow and lacks any inventiveness. You only have a small handful of moves at your disposal, and none of them are very interesting to watch. Drake wields a mallet as his weapon, and along your quest, you’ll earn mallet heads to attach to your weapon that will make it stronger and give you access to new magic attacks. Magic attacks in Dinotopia are rather boring looking and lack any finesse one would expect from a ‘magical’ attack. To worsen matters, the games enemies are dumb, simply put. You’ll come across both human and Dinosaur adversaries, and they usually attack in groups. Both human and Dinosaur enemies alike seem to have an extremely hard time hitting you as long as you stay moving. You practically have to stand in place and allow them to beat you to die, though if you (for some reason) run low on health, there are plants scattered throughout the games areas that will heal some of your health for you. You’ll also have the distinct ‘pleasure’ of being able to ride around on a ‘Skybax’, which is essentially a Pterodactyl that turns out to be rather colorful looking. During these (thankfully) short sequences, you’ll fly from one end of a canyon-like area to the next. There is no combat to be spoken of during these parts of the game, which really makes them just an excuse to show off the games environments, which doesn’t make much sense since the game graphics are rather lacking.

You’ll notice very early on in the game that Dinotopia doesn’t look very pretty. The game has rough edges all over, and the characters are void of any facial animations. Overall, the game looks like it could have been released 3 years ago as a launch game for Playstation 2. The only thing the game has going for it graphically is that it’s pretty colorful. The games areas are vibrant and bright, if uninspired. Considering the heavy Dinosaur aspect in the game, it could have been a really nice graphical showcase had the developers actually decided to put an ounce of effort into the games visuals, but as it stands, Dinotopia is far from eye candy production value.

Just like the visuals, the games sound is bland and boring. The sound effects in the game leave a lot to be desired and sound like they were ripped from an early Playstation or Nintendo 64 game, and the musical aspect isn’t much better. The games voice acting is rife with British and Scottish accents, and dialogue sounds pretty unnatural and forced. NPC characters will often ramble on needlessly during the game for reasons unknown, unless perhaps the developers thought the game would feel more deep if everyone had something to say about ‘mind, body and spirit’ and the like, but as it stands, it just seems like a waste of time and effort on the gamers side to actually sit through the characters menial spiels.

Simply put, Dinotopia is a sloppy game with bad everything. The graphics are bland, the voice acting is stale, and the overall experience is just lacking… a lot. Unless doing a multitude of fetch quests in an unimpressive looking world full of English speaking Dinosaurs sounds like fun to you, chances are you should stay far away from Dinotopia and spend your money elsewhere.