Dinosaur Fossil Hunter Reviews

great game

An absolutely fantastic game, if you don't play for the plot.

If you ever dreamed of being a paleontologist as a kid but never really wanted to do any of the required reading or learn geology, this is it!

Close enough, welcome back Fossil Fighters.

To preface my review: I love dinosaurs. Always have, always will. This game is absolutely perfect if you love dinosaurs, puzzles, comfort and adventure. I come to this game every time I've had a rough day at work, or I just need something positive in my day. The game has lots to offer and much enjoyment to be had. Now, I do have some gripes about certain things, but none of this affects the game itself. The advertising and public marketing has raised my expectations more than the game has delivered. I honestly expected more from this game. I was expecting dinosaurs and other reptiles from all eras, judging by the Brachiosaurus and Allosaurus skeletons in advertising. The game as it stands only contains cretaceous animals. The development team is also very quiet and rather unresponsive, which is concerning for a development team who had gotten crowdfunding support. The game is complete, but things like DLC and future updates, even just hotfixes are just hard to predict. And finally, this issue is more personal than anything, but the game itself, if played with every upgrade and with employees in your museum, is rather repetitive. Most of all I have multiple complete museums at this point and if I'm honest, the galleries in them are never fully filled, making it feel as if the game is incomplete. Above all else, I'm not letting these factors deter me, I still play this game quite a bit and enjoy every second of it. I'm just hoping we can see more content from this game in the future, the designer and raptor DLCs were promising and I'm hoping for more to come. I just wish I had a roadmap to see when these updates might come!

Just days before finding this game, I had a conversation with my wife about how unfair it is that there is a stigma against adults that want to have fun digging for bones, and how there aren't many real-world options for us. It gave me the idea of looking for a game, and I found this. After 9 hours, I will say that I am thoroughly appreciative. I have been having so much fun, and this game is so good at helping me decompress after a long day. If you're a dino fan, this is for you. Of course, there will be the "takes themselves too seriously" dino nerds that try to find every inaccuracy they can and get off on telling others how much smarter they are, but do your best to ignore them.

Wish there was an option to completely skip the driving the car to the dig site part at the very beginning instead of having to upgrade stuff to do it. That's the only real tedium for me. Everything else is fun especially when you spin the fossils like a rotisserie chicken while you're cleaning them. Good in small doses like most sim games. I'm... an anthropologist. You'd have to ask my friend who is the paleontologist how accurate the game is, though.

Good for dinosaur fans, but there's room for improvement. Next game could you include: *No driving segments. The game slows way down (literally and in the boring sense) during those parts. *The option to have the fossil prep team assemble the bones instead of cleaning them. I had to manually click into place every single bony plate of an Edmonta L. (the dino from the loading screen), and I was internally screaming the whole time. *The ability to use the same name for multiple save files. Having to come up with a new one every time or go back and delete old files gets old real fast. *A way to tell if you've found every rock containing specimens at a dig site.