An honest first thoughts and review. Feb 2023

[Raptor Red]

I want to provide something the Devs can use with this review.

I purchased Prehistoric Kingdom as soon as I could to support the game, I am a long time player of tycoon games, JPOG, Zoo Tycoon 1&2, and more recently JWE and Planet Zoo amongst countless others.

I see great potential in this project, and have been following it for some time. Upon release, the game was far too buggy and un-optimised to play, now, around half a year later, I'm happy to say the game is in a playable state, but its far, far from perfect.

The aesthetic is spot on, the dinosaurs are absolutely fantastic, and the graphics are excellent, beautiful work, to the whole team.

I am around 3 hours into my first proper park build, and here are my notes.

- Bugs, lots of UI bugs, especially in the menus, from unlocked species/skins not appearing until reloading the save, to fully complete dig sites showing 0%. Terrain bugs are also causing severe issues, undoing any action with the terrain tools caused random spikes in nearby topography, leading to floating fences, paths and more.

- Quality of life, some simple changes would greatly optimise the game, of course many changes will be added as the game develops, but the most direly needed are as follows:

1. Paths would be greatly improved with a toggle to add a raised lip around the edge of them, the current paths just feel like pngs slapped onto the ground, far too flat. I spent far too much time adding my own pavements and lips, and not enough on the dinosaurs.

2. Difficulty, I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I have all the necessary amenities for guests, and 3 exhibits full of happy, healthy dinosaurs, and yet every month I barely turn $500 in profit, I chose easy mode to get a feel for the game, but I don't feel that I'm making any progress. This doesn't seem to be a glitch, I just cant bring in the necessary money for growth, which is especially bad for "easy" mode.

3. Exhibit Cleaning, I like the exhibit cleaning system, but it is far too taxing. Spending $20k-$50k every 4 minutes on each exhibit is killing me, the $500 profit figure I threw out in my last point hadn't even taken exhibit cleaning into account. The system needs to be adjusted, either by reducing the fee to at least $500-$1000 for all early game dinosaurs, and/or reducing the frequency the exhibits require cleaning by a great margin.


All in all, my best message to the dev team is focus your efforts on fixing these dire bugs and balancing the game play, I understand the need and temptation to add more creatures, and decorations and content, but the game will struggle to maintain a playerbase if the learning curb is too steep, and the bugs too frequent.

I think Prehistoric kingdom is going to be something special, a real gift to the paleo-community, and I can happily say I'll be along for the ride.

- Raptor Red

[Mau]

Hey, thanks for your feedback, we're glad to hear you're having a better experience with the game now than at launch!

On the topic of UI bugs, I am always fixing as many as possible, especially on the excavations unlocking front, although those are especially hard to track down. We're hoping to make things more stable with each passing release.

You'll also be happy to know that we've recently been giving our costs and general economy a bit of a balancing pass, as things are not forgiving enough, especially in the early game at the moment. Continued player feedback is really important in this regard, since you guys are best at letting us know what works and what doesn't.

Thank you for the support and patience!