Dino Land – PS5 Review

Dino Land is a port of a pinball game originally developed by Japanese developers Wolf Team and released on the Megadrive/Genesis (and also the Sharp X68000) way back in 1991.  And it’s really a strange choice of game to port.  The original never led to any sequels, the developers eventually went off to create all those JRPGs with ‘Tales’ in the title and, most notably, the game wasn’t even that well thought of in 1991.

This is very much a ’90s pinball game insofar as it being fully 2D and with a vertically-scrolling table.  You play as a dinosaur who has to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend who seems to be simultaneously trapped in three different worlds.  Each one of these worlds is represented by a two-part table with a lower and upper section but there is also a side-table when you have to fight the bosses (there is one boss per level).

The basic gameplay should be pretty straightforward but there are some complications.  You’ve got your flippers as you’d expect but the controls are a little bit odd there.  The d-pad (any direction) controls the left flipper with the button handling the right flipper.  Not optimal at all.  And, weirdly, while you can define some of the controls in the game, you can’t change the main ones.  Which is dumb, frankly.  You’d want the shoulder buttons to be the flipper controls but they let you get to the menu (the Options button doesn’t, which is also odd).

And in terms of the basic pinball mechanics, it’s not great.  The ball movement here lacks any sort of smoothness or authenticity.  From the flippers it seems like balls get like maybe five directions to launch in.  There’s no finesse possible here.  You can try to roll the ball right to the edge of the flipper and it doesn’t make any difference,  anything in the last 20% of the flipper seems to give the same result.  It just doesn’t feel like pinball.

But, that all said, it is playable.  At least in terms of the core mechanics.  And you’ve got a very handy (if oddly inconsistent) rewind feature mapped right there to .  It’s really handy, especially as the game can be very unfair when it comes to outlanes.  You can get a ten second sequence of bounces that’ll end up with you in the gutter and there be absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, aside from hitting that rewind.  There’s also a speed-up button too which is, of course, a completely stupid thing to include.

When it comes to the rules of the table, things aren’t exactly clear.  There’s a badly translated manual (a literal scan of the original) which is absolutely useless.  But there aren’t a lot of elements on each of the three tables which does at least reduce the amount of things to try when you’re attempting to make progress.  Essentially all you want to know is how to get to the boss (a process that doesn’t really change as it just involves hitting a hole a certain number of times, regardless of the table you’re on) and how to travel to other tables.  That’s completely opaque.  You need to hit switches that go red or blue.  Get them all aligned to one colour and that’ll open up a gateway to the other levels.  You’ll be looking at the same GameFAQs guide I was if you want to figure that stuff out because the game doesn’t care to tell you any of it.

The other thing you’ll really struggle with is beating the bosses.  This is so ridiculously vague and weird.  Sure, you need to hit them with the ball.  That’s obvious.  But a small monster will be moving around the outside of the boss arena towards your girlfriend.  If it gets there, that’s the end of the battle and you’re ejected at which point you’ll need to go through the whole process of getting to the boss again.  And there’s basically no way to figure this out.  Sure, you might stumble on the method but even then the game fights you all the way.

You see, the key to beating the boss is to transform into a dinosaur and then hit that smaller monster to make them rotate away from your girlfriend, which buys you a few extra seconds.  Keep hitting the boss, keep intercepting that other guy and eventually you’ll beat the boss.  The problem is that we’ve got no fucking idea how to transform the dinosaur.  No button seems to do it.  At least not individually.

Spamming both flippers, all the d-pad directions and maybe , kind of gets you there.  Some of the time.  I’m sorry but did literally no-one playtest this?  If you didn’t have the rewind functionality, this would be impossible as you’re so distracted trying to get this basic functionality to work, that you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose your ball trying.

And what’s weirder still is that eventually the transform button (if that’s what it is) and even the ball launch button start also acting as pause buttons.  We tested this on both the PS4 and PS5 versions and it’s the same on both (their both identical in all aspects).

But even if this did all work (and hopefully it’ll get patched), this isn’t a good game.  It was a 5 out of 10 game in 1991 and since then we’ve had Pinball Dreams, Pinball Illusion and, of course, all of the Pinball FX stuff.  Dino Land is just a weird relic that has no place in 1991 really.  The visuals are relatively charming, in a retro style, but that sloppy animation kills all the appeal.  The music is alright but nothing special.  The only good thing about the game is that rewind function as it at least makes it possible to get through and see everything.  But there’s not much reason to do that as it stands.  A remaster might have been interesting but a straight port?  Nah.  This isn’t the one.