Dino Frontier review on PlayStation VR

When I stumble upon the place where I will build my city, there is nothing special here. One settler and a dead dinosaur, surrounded by forests and bushes that bear fruit. I think calling it inhospitable would be a bit of an understatement. But other than the lack of…well…nothing, this is a good place to start. I send a settler to start chopping down trees for the wood we’ll need for construction, and I collect the dinosaur for the meat he can give us. Soon there is a food warehouse and a timber warehouse.

I’m the mayor here, and soon this will be my city. This is Dino Frontier.

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Build your city

It’s true that when you first arrive at Dino Frontier, almost nothing is being built there. It’s an enchanting landscape filled with roaming dinosaurs, trees you can cut down for firewood needed to build buildings, and items you can collect to feed a growing city. From the first moment you set foot here, you are absolutely responsible for everything that happens. The first thing you need to do is start building.

To feed your people, create new buildings and heal wounds, you will need special buildings. Namely: a food warehouse, a timber warehouse and a clinic. Realistically though, this is just the beginning. As you level up and attract new settlers to your city, you’ll need to expand your buildings to keep everyone safe, sane, and well fed. By completing various buildings and tasks, you gain experience that increases your level.

You want to be careful where you place everything, or you might start running out of land.

As you progress through the level, you will gain access to new buildings, more settlers, and a larger piece of land that your city will grow into. Planning ahead is key because the game allows you to decide where to place each building. Initially, it doesn’t really matter because you’re just trying to survive. However, going forward you need to be careful where you place everything, or you may start running out of land for new structures.

One of the fun parts of building new structures for your city is the fact that your settlers don’t have a say in it. They will continue to complete their tasks when a giant hammer appears next to the structure. You will need to pick it up and hammer it until the new building is complete. It’s such a small, silly feature, but it added a layer of fun and feeling like you’re part of a city rather than just an all-powerful ruler.

Micromanage everything

As mayor of this small town, you are in charge of everything that happens. This means telling the settlers what they should be working on, making sure you have enough food, and checking out the various resources that you will gradually start gathering. Controls in Dino Frontier rely on a pair of PlayStation Move controllers, which appear as a pair of hands in-game. You will need to manipulate the world in front of you by rotating, zooming in and out and picking up items.

This is the last one that drove right up to the wall. You see, when you tell a settler to chop wood or collect food, they do half the job. They will hack or collect until the item you need falls to the ground next to them. You must collect these resources and place them in the correct building so that they can be used. Except that about half the time I reached for a wooden cord or a fruit basket, I could see my glove fly off somewhere up and to the right.

My resources were still sitting there, waiting to be collected.

It’s not exactly a strange occurrence, thanks to the occasional tracking issue with the PlayStation VR, but it was really annoying. Particularly because there is so much going on in Dino Frontier. At one point, I was arguing with the game, trying to pick up a tree needed for a new building, while the dinosaurs were brutally beating one of my settlers who was trying to collect food for the city. I ended up having to give up my collection of resources to pick up a settler in trouble and take him to the clinic before he bled to death in the desert.

Of course, my resources were still sitting there waiting to be collected, but failed to grab them and then turn to the next task I needed to handle, making things more difficult than they really needed to be. It only got frustrating when it came time to capture my first Apex Dinosaur — which basically involved my settlers attacking it until it could be stunned and caged — and I couldn’t get my wounded units up to throw them in the clinic .