Roarr! The Adventures of Rampage Rex - Jurassic Edition Review

A videogame should be fun to play. That is the basic premise of any game. If it’s not fun, why bother? I struggled to have any form of enjoyment with Roarr! The Adventures of Rampage Rex - Jurassic Edition – it felt more like a never-ending nightmare of hideous controls, annoying music and dull gameplay. I couldn’t wait to delete the 851MB of this so-called videogame off of my Switch to free up some of the precious internal storage.

The story for Roarr! is a simple one. You play as Sue, a tyrannosaurus rex, who is awoken from a deep hibernation by octopus-like aliens that are invading the earth. Sue is, of course, upset and decides to wreak vengeance upon the noisy foreign invaders. She then sets out on a journey to slash, bite and tail whip every alien until there are no more left, and she can go back to sleep.

Roarr! Is Godzillaesque in its approach. Sue the dinosaur and the aliens, both tower above buildings, while duking it out. Gameplay is stretched across six levels, with the only objectives being wiping out all the aliens – including a final boss for each level – and racking up the highest score possible.

The controls are a bit of a mixed bag. The camera has a mind of its own, and the same can be said for Sue when attacking too. More often than not, Sue would lock on to enemies behind her instead of focussing on the one that I was already engaged in combat with. Sue has three main attacks. A slash, a bite and a special roar attack that can only be used once the special attack meter has filled up - which instantly kills everything within a certain radius. The only way to fill this meter is by walking into buildings and trees and knocking them over. Not by attacking enemies, not by destroying buildings, but by walking into things. And for some reason, walking into trees builds up the meter the quickest? Bit of a strange game mechanic if you ask me…

Enemies come at you in waves; once they have all been killed, you move to the next part of the level. This repeats until you eventually reach a boss fight. Some of these levels feel exceptionally long and tedious. The aliens are varied and have some interesting attacks that might catch you off guard at first, but in the end, the combat feels underwhelming and devoid of any fun. I just mashed the slash button over and over again as it doesn’t make a difference which attack you use. Perhaps, if the bite attack did a bit more damage, and included a cooldown, it might make things more interesting, and force the player to come up with a strategy? This is all well and good if you could actually hit anything though. Hit detection is way off. Not just for attacking enemies, but also when they attack you -- which at times can be very frustrating.

However, the bugs don’t stop there! Bosses would randomly switch the way they were facing, or teleport to a different part of the map. I encountered numerous frame rate drops, especially on the third level, and I kept bumping into invisible walls that were not supposed to be there. Also, the dinosaur starts off being called Rex, then changes his/her name to Sue. Perhaps this is the first gender fluid representation of a dinosaur in a videogame? If so, props to Born Lucky Games for being so progressive.

Now, I have tinnitus and am a little deaf in my left ear (don’t stand next to the speakers at concerts, kids), but while playing Roarr! this is the only time in my 28 years of existence that I have wanted the high pitch whining in my ears to be louder to drown out the sickeningly bright and cheery music which is looped, over and over again.

Overall, Roarr! The Adventures of Rampage Rex - Jurassic Edition is a bad game that isn’t fun to play. The only positive I can find is that the aliens can sometimes look a little cute and they are pretty varied. Other than that, the gameplay is dull and marred with hit detection problems, the music doesn’t deserve to grace anyone's eardrums and most importantly, it’s not fun. Sure, this game (at the time of writing) is only £7.19 on the Nintendo eShop, but it seriously doesn’t even warrant that price. Perhaps this will keep a couple of five-year-olds entertained for about 10 minutes, but why would you put them through this hell? Don’t you love your kids? Save the money and put it towards something else instead.