Here come the dino diggers

I have had a lot of fun over the course of this blog comparing app games that are very similar.  A new category I have been toying with are the "dino digger" games.  These are games where you own a museum, go digging for bones, add bones to the skeletons, and try to attract more customers.

So far, I have played with MyMuseum, Dino Park, and Dino Quest 2.  Again, once we have chosen a theme or style of a game, the games in the category tend to be very similar.  I assume they are all pulling from some general design, some basic concept of what users expect from a game of that sort.

In MyMuseum you have the museum view with your skeletons and little customers walking by with thought bubbles and coin drops.  The dinopedia shows the skeleton, how many you have, how many excavations you did, and how many visitors.  You can snap a photo of your museum.  There are achievements, bonuses you can buy, all the usual stuff.  The art is mid-level pixel art.  The map has multiple locations with dino names starting as ???????? and gradually filling in letters as you learn more.  At the dig, you get a limited number of clicks to break blocks in a small hex grid.  Right now I have two items to find and 12 clicks to find them.  Your tools can be improved, starting with breaking just one block and the area/effect getting better with upgrades.  Power-ups include extra case to hold extra bones, stamina drink, bulldozer and radar.  The power-ups are unlocked with Google Play Pass, so I got two of each for free.  The power-up page has a little "item roulette" button which lets you win items.  Anyway, find bones, add to skeletons, add displays, get coins.

Crazy Dino Park is very similar, almost screen by screen you get the same options.  This one has better art, still blocky but more of a smoothed-out South Park feel than the pixel art world of My Museum.  This is an outdoor space instead of a big room.  You hop into a little truck (multiple tiers of vehicles available) and pick a dig site.  Here, you brush away the top layer by swiping, which is cute.  You can then pick up any exposed bones and try to complete the patterns at the top.  Then you get three pickaxes to break rocks to find more.  You can buy 3 more picks for one gem or watch an ad (of course).  Dig Again or Return to Park.  Back at the park, if you filled a crate you get to add the bones to outlines of the creatures.  You can breed the creatures together to level them up.  I expect there will be a lot of these bouncy, cartoony characters to discover.  Level up to access new digging locations, which give parts to new creatures.  It's all very well designed and presented.  There is a whole gallery of "other items" you can find and display -- right now I have a lucky horsehose there.  Also a dinopedia with stats for each level of each creature.  Scrolling back and forth in the main outdoor world, there are a lot of buildings and new sites to unlock.

I need to recharge my tablet (what did I just say about batteries in my last post??) and will continue the series with Dino Quest 2 in the next post.