|
It's not like the gameplay evokes any base emotions in you though, other than frustration. The camera defines the term "uncooperative", for you'll constantly find yourself tweaking with it to see where you're going. Controls are decent and fairly intuitive, although the lock-on system could use some fine tuning. However, when using your Dinobreaker (and there's no real excuse as to why you shouldn't), it overheats when you take damage, and at that point you find yourself being ejected from it and into the thick of battle. Unless you're always keeping an eye on your health gauge and regularly ejecting to cool down your Dinobreaker, you'll find yourself backed into very uncomfortable corners at the most inopportune of times.
When one encounters such blasé gameplay as this, it's usually refreshing to see something else thrown in the mix. In D.I.C.E.'s case, this distraction of sorts is the racing portion of the game, and unfortunately it only ends up adding to the rage. Cornering is absolutely finicky, more so than other games in the actual racing genre, and once you get into a scrape, you're pretty much done. See, when you careen off the course or crash into a wall, you find yourself out of your car because it's overheated, and you can't get back in it until the temperature's back to optimal capacity. I swear, my insurance agent could file a claim and have my car towed faster than my Dinobreaker would cool down.
There are other little things that really got on my nerves. Much like many action-platformers, the path of destruction you leave is littered with currency; in this case, metal chips are used to upgrade your Dinobreakers and Satellite Bots at the Garage. However, instead of giving you more information on what you could buy in the Garage, selecting the upgrade automatically purchases it for you. Also, when you look at the control guide while paused, the game tells you that you attack with a lettered button and so forth. Now, last time I checked, the Dual Shock 2's face buttons didn't have letters, weird arrows, and the ilk. I tried cross-referencing it with the colors of the buttons, and that didn't work out either. Luckily, the instruction manual had a helpful chart, but what's the point of having an in-game control schematic when you can't understand it?
The overall feeling that I get from playing D.I.C.E. is that it was rushed to capitalize on the popularity of the series -- that and a headache. Although the target audience is obviously the lower end of the E-10 spectrum, the game is so shallow that I can't imagine many gamers, regardless of age, sticking with this tripe for more than a few hours. I had to force myself to sit down and get through the game, and that's a feeling that nobody should have upon turning on their console. I was really hoping that D.I.C.E. would be something more than what everyone assumed it would be, but in this case, I advise you all to give in to peer pressure and stay away.
|
