Paleo Pines takes the familiar feeling of many farming simulators and adds a Paleozoic touch. Conceptually interesting, Paleo Pines, unfortunately, misses the mark in its execution, becoming yet another derivative title in a quickly inflating genre. While Paleo Pines is far from the worst game on the market, its lack of innovations on familiar mechanics means you might be better off checking out another title.
To specify, Paleo Pines feels super familiar to a slew of other titles in the genre I’ve played before. Not totally the same, mind you. The game does do some things differently, and I’ll certainly give these aspects their just consideration. On the whole, however, I’d say that Paleo Pines fails to stand out from many of the other farming sims I’ve reviewed on this site, a problem this genre has been particularly struggling with of late.
With a plethora of games coming out with similar mechanics and designs, it’s becoming increasingly important for titles to stand out from each other. In the case of Paleo Pines, your typical farming simulator is mixed up with the inclusion of Dinosaurs to raise and care for. This on it’s own isn’t the most original idea — You can see a similar concept done in ARK: Survival Evolved. Paleo Pines is like ARK without any of the aggressive survival mechanics, so it’s more of a relaxed experience.
Dinosaurs are more than just pets in Paleo Pines. They’re useful tools you’ll need to utilize to work on your farm. From bulldozing piles of wood or rocks, tilling soil, or watering your plants, utilizing different dinos to maximize your farm’s efficiency is a good way to incentivize taming and caring for a variety of dinosaurs.
And you’ll really be caring for them, too. Each dinosaur has a series of needs, including attention, that need to be treated to each day to keep them happy. You can’t just neglect your dinosaurs, as they have a happiness meter that will fall if they aren’t cared for.
The numerous tasks you have to complete in a day, including giving your dinosaurs attention and watering your crops, are tracked in your journal at the start of each day. I really appreciated this little piece of information in the hud, as it made doing the daily chores a lot easier. This was especially true when I started doing back-to-back day skipping to get my plants to grow.
Harvesting plants yields a ton of vegetables too, which I found super satisfying. I hadn’t realized until playing Paleo Pines just how annoying it can be to care for a crop for days on end only to harvest a single carrot. Bushels of plants will grow in proper realistic sizes in Paleo Pines so you feel like your time wasn’t better spent elsewhere.
Those are the aspects of Paleo Pines that I particularly enjoy. The act of farming is fairly cookie cutter of other games in the genre, with the map being a sort of tile or grid-based system that can be interacted with using your various tools. Use your hoe on a block of dirt, plant a seed, water it. Think of Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Dinkum, or other familiar farming games. One twist I do like though is that you can catalog the different plants as you grow them to learn their grow times, watering requirements, etc.
If the game heavily innovates any of its gameplay from this point on, I failed to notice it, and it was beyond the discovery of the farming mechanic’s depth (or lack thereof) where Paleo Pines started to fail to hold my interest. Minimal housing and not very interesting characters (the cast of the local town is surprisingly small, by the way) made upgrading the farm and completing quests more of a chore than an exciting gameplay loop. I preferred to just spend my days watering crops and heading to bed early.
Some poor game design choices and bugs certainly didn’t help. Leaving your farm, entering town, and other areas transition via load screens, unnecessarily separating parts of what could be an open map into tiny, segmented pieces. Having to get through two load screens just to get into town put a bit of a strain on my attention span.
These load screens seem to exasperate another problem I had, which was textures not seeming to load in when they should have. Huge grass plains and paths were blurry, and I had choppy framerates at most areas in the game. I like to think I have a computer that should be able to run this game, and watching some of the developers stream I can see that this was not a me-exclusive problem.
The game doesn’t look the best either. I know that art is subjective, and so saying that the game’s art direction isn’t my favorite is a subjective statement. Less subjectively, I’d criticize the lack of animation in places where the game really needs it, such as sprinting, which is jittery and weird since the game just plays the standard walking animation faster. Pair these with the blurry textures and the game just doesn’t look very good.
The Final Word
Paleo Pines is a competent farming game with some interesting takes on Dinosaur care, and if that’s all you’re looking for you will most certainly find it here. Unfortunately, the game follows many other releases in the genre in its lack of imaginative or meaningful changes on tired and familiar gameplay, with the things it does right few and far between. If you don’t mind the lack of imagination and lackluster visual presentation, Paleo Pines would be a good game for you, but might be better for a younger audience or someone who’s yet to play a farming game.
6
Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Paleo Pines is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch and Xbox.