A Mobile Port That Gives Us The Veloci-Rage
Imagine a video game that lets you play as a velociraptor. Cool, right? Raptors are fast, agile, powerful – a top-3 dinosaur, easy. A game that captures that feeling would be ace.
Now, we have a challenge for you. Imagine a velociraptor video game that’s boring. Not just boring after a while, but boring from the very beginning. How might you make that game? What would it look like?
When thought about in this way, Raptor Evolution is actually a significant achievement. Before we’d played Raptor Evolution, we wouldn’t have been able to envision a dull velociraptor game. But here we are, reviewing one.
A Cretaceous Clicker
Raptor Evolution’s secret is that it never, ever lets you do the attacking. All of the joyous things about being a velociraptor – the pouncing, leaping, flanking from the sides (clever girl) and clambering on the back of T-Rexes – that’s all automated. You don’t do any of that.
So, what on Isla Nublar do you do then? Well, you park your Raptor. It makes us snigger to write it. Yep, you sidle up to stuff and wait. If there’s a target, you reverse-park next to it and wait for its health bar to reach zero. Then you stop-start to your next target like a lazy Amazon Prime driver until all of them are down. Delightful.
That can still be cool, right? You still get to see Raptors maul things. Well, funny you should mention that…
It’s Black Bin Day
In Raptor Evolution, 99% of what you attack is garbage. Literal garbage. The world is covered with rocks, fallen trees, bins, tyres and the like. By slicing these up, the velociraptor gains resources, and those resources can be used to velocijazzle your dinosaur. You get Wolverine claws, go-faster stripes and funky skins. With these you can slice up hardier, higher-level garbage, and so the cycle of slicing continues.
We should remind you that you’re not even the one who is attacking the flowerpots and broken cars in Raptor Evolution. You’re just parking next to them, and the computer does the rest.
Okay, okay, but that makes it a cosy game, right? There’s still enjoyment to be found in that. You can meditatively rid the world of rubbish and do some good for the environment. It’s a relaxing thing. Come on – they can’t have got that wrong too, can they?
We’ll Give You One Guess
Oh yes, they have indeed. Because Raptor Evolution wants you to play for a very, very long time. So there’s not enough garbage in the vicinity to level up. You’re always short by a few hundred plastic bottles or pink flowers. What’s a dromaeosaurid to do? Well, grind of course!
As Raptor Evolution progresses, you unlock new features including Hunts. These can be completed repeatedly, charging through the same arena with the same garbage hotspots, and – oh sweet variety – some randomly placed bases with enemies surrounding them. ‘Hunts’ as a term is a little ambitious, as it’s mostly parking in some supermarkets and killing any ghouls that turn up.
Raptor Evolution wants you to complete Hunts dozens, if not hundreds, of times. They’re the only way to get certain resources, so you’re forced to replay these two-minute masterpieces multiple times. The grind in Raptor Evolution is very much real.
Why is there so much grind? Aha, now we’re getting to the amber-infused core of why Raptor Evolution is how it is. This is a mobile port. Now it all makes sense: attacks are automated because mobile players don’t have fancy things like controllers; the emphasis is on waiting because iPhone owners can second-screen this with a spot of Netflix; and the grind is fine because players on the move are likely to be playing for five minutes at a time.
Some games really should stay on mobile. It’s clear that Raptor Evolution has ‘evolved’ to suit its origin format, but that’s not much good when you have a controller in hand, no second-screen, and your attention focused on the game.
Rummaging In The Dinosaur Poo
To give Raptor Evolution some credit, it has done some jiggery-pokery to make it console friendly. You’re given a pretty generous pile of soft currency which we presume would have been a) less generous and b) costly on mobile. That does mean you can skip large proportions of the grind, but there’s something that irks me about that. Why is the grind so grindy if you can just skip it? It also has the whiff of cheating.
Raptor Evolution also looks great – much better than most other sub-£5 games that we play on the Xbox Store. The environments and dinosaurs are chunky and garish, like a dinosaur toy set, which makes the destruction of them at least somewhat satisfying. But it doesn’t half make us wish that these assets were used for a more enjoyable Raptor game.
Plus Raptor Evolution is huge. We stopped wanting to play it as soon as 1000G popped, but there’s so much content beyond that point. There are four Hunts, multiple Raid steps, bosses and new arenas to unlock, as well as different ways to upgrade your avatar. There’s a lot of content for a reason – to sell DLC and soft currency via the grind – but you can appreciate the hours-to-£s ratio.
A Bin-Collecting Evolution We Didn’t Ask For
But hey, who am I kidding? This is a monumental disappointment. Any game that lets you pull on your Velociraptor suit should, at the very least, be thrilling. Somehow, Raptor Revenge can’t even manage that. It takes one of the coolest animals to have ever lived, files off their claws and makes them a bin collector. That’s where Evolution takes you, I suppose.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/raptor-evolution/9n7sq8vzzzrr
There’s a Complete Edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/raptor-evolution-complete-edition/9N8M003PMQMH/0010
