Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey

Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey, is an action adventure title based on the book series of the same name. The game puts you in control of Drake Gemini: a young man who washed ashore on Dinotopia with his family, to find an island where dinosaurs and humans co-exist peacefully, through a mystical root of longevity.

An interesting premise, to be sure, and it only gets more interesting in the first few cutscenes. Drake and his brother, Jacob, find that their father had been killed by a T-Rex. They both seek out combat training, though for different reasons. Drake seeks to protect Dinotopia, as his father wished, and Jacob seeks to destroy dinosaurs for what they have done to his father. Simple enough, but it opens up a lot of narrative doors. Doors which are left unexplored, I might add.

Rather than focus on the contrast between the two brothers and their goals, the game solely focuses on Drake, and ignores anything to do with his family until near the endgame. Without so much as even a little motivation from the plot, the gameplay begins, and you're quickly treated to something that would immediately turn most players away: a whole ton of fetch quests.

Find this man's missing marbles, find these special plants, find my apples, and find these four plaques around town. I do my best to give games the benefit of the doubt, but I am only human, and I was dreadfully afraid the entire game would be tedious fetching missions with no sense of progression or plot. To make matters worse, during the first few action sections, you're hurled into some of the most underwhelming and just plain standard combat in any game.

You're given a hammer that you can equip with gems to increase its strength, but the gems are found so frequently that it's pretty hard not to have it fully powered just a short bit after acquiring it. Worse still, is that for many, many stages, bystanders would like nothing more than for you to find things for them and return said items for a reward. These rewards range from gems, which you already have plenty of, armor, the only useful NPC item in the game, or peppers, which are so useless it's silly to bother explaining them.

Although combat doesn't feel bad, you're still essentially pressing the A button a whole lot.

A positive to all this repetition and tedium is the presentation and feel of the world. The scenery, though technically low quality, is immersive and pleasing. A lot of work went into the graphical presentation of the setting, and it shows in the smallest of ways, like how the camera is incredibly adamant about keeping anything at all from clipping.

If you manage to put up with the tedium for a solid three hours, the game does something unexpected. It has a plot. The Outsiders, a gang of humans that believe living alongside dinosaurs is unnatural, have built a factory to manufacture "strutters", which turn out to be assault robots. What. Either way, it gives the game purpose. Or at least it would, if the solution was not found less than an hour later, along with your regretful brother and a convenient robot to fight the other robots with.

A noble steed.

From then on, the game drops most of its fetch quests in favor of the combat. Surprisingly enough, the combat improves as the game goes on, offering you a larger (but still inadequate) variety of moves and ways to dispatch enemies. Four. Hours. In. For the final hour of the game, the story suddenly decides it wants to do things with itself, and you're treated to more settings, some pretty interesting boss fights (you get a chance to fight the t-rex that killed Drake's father) and a cool looking, if underwhelming final confrontation.

The game ends abruptly, cutting to credits that show off what I assume are meant to be the memorable and fond characters of your quest, and then it's just over. There are flashes of personality, briefly in the narrative, and sometimes again in the enemy designs and world, but it never realizes something more for itself. That being said, it's still at the very least a competent game, and there are worse ways you could spend 5 hours of your time. You just have to really like dinosaurs.