Paleo Pine Review: Bare Bones

Review based on patch 1.4.

The focus of this 'cozy' ranching game is more about dinosaur collecting than farming, which is done primarily to earn money. To tame a dinosaur the player needs to lure it near by playing its 'Friend Song' - a series of colored bubbles. Not only does the order of colors need to be right but the 'loudness' of each note as well. The player then needs to move the needle on a 'Friend meter' into the green zone by feeding and soothing. Too far in either direction and the tame will fail. Once in the green, the player then needs to feed the preferred Poppin (cake) type or the tame will fail. Even feeding the correct Poppin will not always result in an immediate tame, so the process may need to be repeated several times. I imagine children may struggle with this system.

Every animal has two skills: wild (Sprinter, Slasher, Discoverer, Smasher, Stomper) and farm (Waterer, Tiller, Clearer, Harvester, Tender) - that will assist with different elements of gameplay. The Wild variety are useful when you venture out from your ranch and the Farm ones will assist with planting duties.

You have to feed and interact with your dino's everyday to keep their friendship level up or they'll run away.

The farming is a bit of a frustrating enterprise because of how finicky the movement can be along with placement that makes it hard to hit the correct tiles or pull up a fence post. When ploughing with a dinosaur like styracosaurus, there will often be a missed square or two that I would have to go back in and fix by hand. Dinosaurs also spray water in an erratic pattern that makes it hard to tend to crops without multiple passes. On a positive note, this is the only farming sim that I have seen implement a convincing crop rotation mechanic by having each crop prefer a different soil type - soft, sticky or firm, and when harvested leaves behind a soil type different from the one they were planted in. It is a beautifully simple system.

There are repeating quests you can complete, although they are all the same "fetch X item - material -food" type filler. By doing enough of these your bond with NPCs will increase, opening up unique character requests and main storyline missions. Sadly, the NPCs are merchants first, people second. That is, the social elements are almost nonexistent.

I was really looking forward to this dino ranching game; unfortunately first impressions are important and this one launched well before it was ready. There are also a host of little annoyances such as there being no hotbar or item wheel, so you have to click through multiple menus to build or interact with anything.

With patches installed the bugs continued to be a detriment to gameplay and I inevitably lost interest. Only time will tell if it gets properly fixed in the future. Even ignoring the technical issues, there is the fundamental problem that if you took the dinosaurs out of the game there would not be much content left worth engaging with. 

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