Dear Journal,

Today I was a T-Rex fighting a Stegosaurs and was honestly, genuinely bored.

It quickly seems like most of the titles coming through the pipeline in this quest to rid my backlog of… well my backlog are just taking mediocre to a whole new level.  Maybe, somewhere in my subconscious I knew this and this is part of the reason why so many of these games lingered on my shelf for so long, collecting dust and dirty looks.  Yet, when I purchased my 3DS last holiday season and was eagerly looking for games to play on it, I gave in to a Best Buy deal of the day that netted me Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs 3D for $5.  At that price, how bad could it be?

Congrats Ubisoft, you made me not only regret buying a $5 video game, but you managed to make T-Rex lame.

Not since the days before Jurassic Park has the T-Rex been so down.  In fairness, it isn’t just the mighty T-Rex feeling the hurt. Triceratops, Velociraptor and Stegosaurs are also sitting in the waiting room at Ubisofts’ offices saying, “WTF? You said we were going to be cool man!” This of course is right before Trike, which is of course the Triceratops’ nickname, knocks over the water cooler and gives Jim the intern a concussion while whipping his tail around in blind anger. Meanwhile, T-Bone (T-Rex) is all like, “Yo, Trike, call down and count to ten dude, just like in therapy, here, breath into this paper bag.” But T-Bone can’t reach Trike’s mouth due to his tiny arms and he continues his freakout while Stego (you can figure that one out) just opens up a flask and starts drinking out of sheer depression.

Seriously, the scenario above is about a-thousand times more entertaining than Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs.

The game looks great in 3D, and the short levels that you walk through while approaching your next battle really are fantastic looking; sadly the rest of the game is just plain boring.  Each level consist of walking along a path for a while, breaking rock formations, tree branches and roaring at small dinosaurs to unlock “items” and “dinosaur facts” before you reach one of the level’s various bosses (each level has a species them).  Once you are battling the enemy (on a separate plateau apparently), you must implore one of a couple various tactics to K.O. your opponent and progress forward.  Sadly though there is very little variance between the various species and ultimately almost all the dinosaurs are best defeated by just pushing them till they fall off and you win by default.

And so the game goes.  Now, this could still be saved but once you beat the game with T-Rex you must then beat the game once again using Triceratops, and so on.  You have to do this four times before finally facing the end boss with all four of your champions.  The problem though is that each play though is basically identical, and the pay-off, i.e. the end boss, is so disappointingly easy that you hate yourself for pushing forward.

Case and point, Combat of Giants bored even my eight-year-old nephew; as was obvious from the fact he only ever borrowed the game once.  When you can’t manage to make two dinosaurs fighting each other cool to an eight year old you have failed, miserably.

Tomorrow I rock the dead, which makes sense cause I am playing Rock of the Dead.

Final Rating: 3/10

CBR Break Down:
Console Played On: 3DS
Time to completion: 5 hours 27 minutes
Gamer Score Earned: N/A
Price Bought at: $5
Current Price: $15.29 (Amazon)
Recommend Purchase Price: Under $5, if that.
Why you should buy it: The game is moderately fun for the first playthough.
Why you shouldn’t buy it: You feel a need to “finish” games, as this will bore you beyond the first dinosaur.