If you’ve been following this site for a while you know I’m a huge Dinosaur nut, so if a game has dinosaurs in it I’m instantly compelled to play it. A good dinosaur game is hard to come by and that’s why I’m so stoked for Primal Carnage. A class based shooter that pits humans against dinosaurs, Lukewarm media’s Primal Carnage has been on my radar since I saw their gorgeous trailer featuring a T-Rex and a Spinosaurus getting down-right prehistoric with each other. The character models had an incredible level of detail and the animation was so perfect, I was amazed. You can check out that trailer here. Imagine my surprise when I ran into Lukewarm Media at PAX! They were showcasing both the PC and the newly announced Mobile versions of the game.
The mobile version of the game
(for IOS and Android) is an ‘on rails’ shooter. In the demo they showed off at Pax, you fired a high caliber machine gun into a T-rex’s face. Looks like a fun time-killer, but the real star of the show for me was the PC version.
In the PC version they had on display, Four classes were playable. On the Dinosaur side you had the T-Rex and the Raptor. The Raptor can sprint and has an instant kill (correction: I’ve been informer that the ponce isn’t an instant kill I just seemed that way when I played it) pounce move which are both governed by a stamina meter. Raptors go down relatively easy so avoiding gun fire is key to a Raptor’s survival. The T-rex on the other hand is slow and lumbering. He’s big, real big. A human player has no trouble spotting him and the screen shakes when he’s near by, but he can take a lot of damage so it’s no problem at all to wade into the fray and snack on tasty, bite-sized humans. All Dinosaurs are played from a third person perspective, making it feel more like an action game than a shooter. On the human end of the spectrum you could play as the Scientist or Commando. The scientist sports a sniper rifle, and a dart gun. These darts slow dinosaurs down and blur their vision. The Commando is a shirtless black guy who packs an assault rifle with built in grenade launcher. He looks like he’d be right at home in GI Joe (the cartoon, not the movie), as a matter of fact all the human characters look that way. At first glance the humans seem out matched, but I found that by using the long grass I could avoid the T-Rex and that at a distance the raptors are easy pickings.
Producer and lead designer Ashton Anderson was on hand to show off the game and answer questions. He let me in on a few more things they plan on adding, some of which are unheard of in a class based shooter. He revealed that the tiny Compsognathus would be controlled in a similar fashion to the minions in Overlord. With you taking control of an alpha compy who sends the rest of his pack out to do the fighting. They also plan to give the Pathfinder class a pet dog who uses sound cues like barks and whimpers to alert the player that a dinosaur is near by.
I try to be as non-biased as possible and point out a flaw or two even in games I like, but for this one the only bad thing I can say about it is that I can’t play it right now. Which really sucks!
