Yesterday I downloaded another augmented reality virtual pet simulator game called AR Dino Pet. I’ve already tried out AR Pet Simulators with cats like Miaow and Cattery, a worm in My Very Hungry Caterpillar, and dragons in Follow Me Dragon and AR Dragon but one with a little cute Dinosaur, I haven’t tried it yet.
How to play AR Dino Pet?
Playing AR Dino Pet is really simple. After ARKit located a surface it spawns a cute little dinosaur baby for you to play with.
This augmented reality game has only a few simple interactions:
- Get the dinosaur to fetch a ball and bring it to you
- Tickle your pet and see his reactions
- Feed him
- Call him to come to you
Yep, that’s about it.
Dino AR Gameplay Experience
Dino AR was probably the ARKit pet simulator games that I enjoyed playing the least. There are several reasons for that and I will mention them here.
First of all, for some reasons that is behind my understanding, the detected surface stayed on the screen. It should be visible only for the surface detection phase, there is no need to make it visible after the game starts.
Second, the character shadows have no transparency, they are just solid black. This just make the character disconnected from the real world scene, again, it’s a mistake and there is no reason to adjust it in the settings.
The Dino character looks cute, but the animations aren’t too exciting. I think that the character animations are probably the most important part in this type of game. The interaction themselves are also quite boring. Just look at the character animations in Follow Me Dragon, they make the character so loveable. Look at how the ball game plays in AR Dragon, it’s really a two-side interaction and it helps to trigger an emotional response from the player and help create a bond between the player and the virtual character, especially for kids. Dino feels more like a robot compared to the Dragon characters in Follow Me Dragon and AR Dragon. There is certainly room for improvement there.
The developer did mention that more features are coming soon, so I hope those issues will be addressed and the entire experience will be improved.
It’s not a bad game, it’s just that it falls quite far compared to the other ones. I didn’t get a chance to play with a Dino pet before in augmented reality, so I’ve decided to give it a shot. Maybe it’s the only Dino pet ARKit game out there, who knows. If you love dinosaurs,you will probably like playing with this app.