A Tower Defence That has Been Stripped Right Back to the (Dino) Bones
Dino Hex Trap simultaneously surprised me and made sense. It’s made by Afil Games, who are incredibly prolific publishers on Xbox, and they love a hex-based game. These hex-based games often ask you to do a spot of Pipemania, swapping and swivelling the hexes to make a series of paths. We see a couple of these titles from Afil Games every month.
Dino Hex Trap looked like it was going to slot into that line-up. But it does something very different with the hex-based paths: it opts to be a tower defence game instead. Instead of making paths, it wants you to defend them.
Tony Hawk Protoceratops Skating
Dino Hex Trap makes me wonder if I am the bad guy. The opponent – the troops you need to kill – are fun-loving dinosaurs on skateboards. Just look at the blighters in the screenshots: they just want to have a good time, gliding around the Cretaceous period on their boards. So, what do we do? We plop down landmines, pulse cannons and spikes. Yeah, you can’t convince me that we’re the good guys in Dino Hex Trap.
Each level starts with a twisting route leading from one or more dinosaur caves. They eventually wend towards one or more tents, which you need to defend. These camps only have 20 life points, so you have a limit to the number of dinosaurs that get to kickflip inside. A bonus gem is on offer if you manage to keep your camp entirely dino-free.
Luckily, you have some cash to spend. That cashpile is different per level, and it lets you afford four different turrets. The cheapest – and the most essential – is a kind of goo cannon. It drops ooze onto the floor, which slows the dinosaurs down. Considering you will be facing one green dino that can absolutely pelt around the course, the goo cannon is a must. It enables the abilities of all the turrets that follow.
Next up in my ‘Top 4 Turrets Countdown’ is a spike trap. It’s second cheapest, after the goo cannon, but it’s cheap enough that you can spam the areas where the dinosaurs might be concentrating. In loops that have been glooped, for example.
Rounding out the rest of the list is the most expensive: a kind of pulse cannon, which destroys everything in a radius at the cost of a long cooldown, and a mine-dropping tower which is so rubbish and similar to the pulse cannon that I’m not going to bother describing it.
Please Sir, Can I Have More Turrets?
This, you might have noted, is not a long list of towers. They can’t be upgraded either, so you can be sure that you’re going to be particularly familiar with them by the end of Dino Hex Trap. We completely understand that Dino Hex Trap is a sub-£5 budget game, but it doesn’t leave you with many permutations for placing traps.
It’s slightly unsurprising, then, that optimal approaches start to creep in. We found ours in the second half of the 30 levels. A couple of goo cannons are essential to slow down the flipping sprinting dinos. They need to hit as many dinosaurs as possible, so they go in the curved roads and crossroads. Then it’s a wall of spike traps, pointing into the slime if possible, or just afterwards if not.
I can’t see how anyone would play differently in the opening moments. You don’t have much cash, and the pulse cannon and mines just don’t kill enough enemies to make their price worth it. So, you wait for enough dinosaurs to die and fund your kitty, because then it’s pulse cannon o’clock. These would get spam-placed around my base, providing an instant kill for anyone who made it through my kill corridor.
You might want to mindwipe everything I’ve written, as it’s a guaranteed 100% chance of success. But who am I kidding? Everyone is going to arrive at the same conclusion. There’s no other approach that comes close.
Having an optimal way to play, which works for every level, is a little disappointing. It removes the sense of threat and stakes. Dino Hex Trap does try to disrupt matters by having multiple bases, diverging paths and whatnot but it can’t make things challenging – and varied – enough that the optimal approach stops working.
After Careful Consideration, I’ve Decided Not to Endorse Your Park
To be fair to Dino Hex Trap, there’s still some joy and thought to be had around where you place those goo cannons and spike traps. Picking the right choke-point is essential, and that can take some consideration. Plus, dominating the opposition can deliver its own kind of kick. It’s just not the depth and breadth of strategy that I expect from a tower defence game.
There are also a few side-quirks that you wouldn’t expect from the genre. You can sell and replace turrets, which is great, but I didn’t find a good way of tabbing from one tower to another. When you’re playing at speed, awkwardly yanking the cursor over to the turret selection is not what you want to be doing. When there are only four turrets available, there should have been a means of selecting them quickly, like with the shoulder buttons. We tended to stick to one turret – the pulse cannon – once the dinos started making their move.
Minimal to the Extreme
I didn’t not have a good time with Dino Hex Trap. As a tower defence game it may be minimalist, but the important things are there: varied towers, simple controls, and lanes that make you stop and think: where am I going to create the most carnage?
But any tower defence fan is going to be looking under rocks and interfaces to find what’s missing. The turrets can’t be upgraded, and there are only four of them – two of which largely do the same thing. There are only a handful of enemies, and the levels are limited to the small number of hexes that they can show on a single screen. Dino Hex Trap ends up feeling like an experiment: how much joy can you get from the bare minimum of tower defence features?
Plus I’m still thinking about those skateboarding dinosaurs. They deserved so much better than getting impaled on my death spikes. Poor guys.
Important Links
Afil Games Trades Platforming For Dinosaur Defence In Dino Hex Trap – https://www.thexboxhub.com/afil-games-trades-platforming-for-dinosaur-defence-in-dino-hex-trap/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/dino-hex-trap-xbox-series/9NCJLP0KHK6N/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/dino-hex-trap-xbox-one/9PCXK8BML6C4/0010
There’s a PC drop too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/dino-hex-trap-windows/9NQD13ZVZ166/0010
