Derpy Dinos

Fast-paced arcade games are designed to challenge your reflexes and keep you on your toes at all times, especially those that involve shooting of any kind. Everything must work flawlessly in order for the players to feel like their talents are being rewarded, because dying due to bad controls is much worse than not being good enough to overcome a certain challenge.

Derpy Dinos is a 2.5D action game that provides you with a rather small play area and a pretty simple goal: Survive for as long as you can while abducting dinosaurs and shooting them with lasers. There are some other elements that influence your experience, such as power-ups and special challenges, but the underlying mechanics remain fairly basic regardless of what happens on the screen.

Your spaceship has two main functions, and it’s important to combine them in order to get the best effects. Hence, you can shoot lasers at your enemies or pick up dinosaurs from the ground and use them as ammunition. However, you cannot shoot your lasers if you have dinosaurs picked up, and it’s a lot harder to hit your targets using living ammunition. Naturally, you get more points by using dinosaurs, so it’s worth the extra bother.

Speaking of points, the ultimate goal is to get the biggest score you can, which requires you to survive for as long as possible and use combos to succeed. Not only that, but you can actually compare your scores on the world leaderboard, which is a great way to keep the players engaged and competing with each other. Achievements are also part of the deal, but you have to accomplish pretty wild feats in order to receive them.

Lastly, the graphics are by far the low point of the game, even though they don’t matter as much under the circumstances. The island you circle is very small and unimpressive from a visual standpoint, since it’s basically a lump of land with a volcano in its center. The enemies and the ship itself are not very detailed either, but at least there are some blood splashes and explosions when things get out of hand.

Derpy Dinos is probably not the king of game that catches you in its spell for hours on end, but the high score aspect certainly has its appeal. Thus, it’s fun to go back to it every once in awhile to try your luck.