DragoDino

My instinct with debut games from tiny studios is always to lean in and look for what they were clearly trying to build rather than what slipped through the cracks. DragoDino is a 2D roguelike platformer made by two people at TealRocks Studio in Paris: one programmer, one artist, and a third collaborator handling the soundtrack. The care in the visuals is immediately obvious. The Forest Kingdom levels are bright, saturated, and full of character, exactly the kind of colorful cartoon world that a two-person team pulls off best when they focus their energy. The core loop has you guiding Bob, a compact little dragon-dinosaur creature, vertically upward through ten procedurally generated levels. Each section of a level is gated behind a super-jump that only unlocks once you have collected all the blue diamonds scattered across the platforms. Those diamonds drop from specific enemies that glow with a blue aura, so there is always a priority target to hunt. Bob can jump, glide, execute a charged super-jump, and shoot energy projectiles at enemies, and the movement toolkit feels purposeful on paper. Layered on top are single-use power-ups, active abilities that grant new skills, passive upgrades that improve core stats, and an in-game merchant where you spend collected coins. Only three power-ups can be equipped at once, so there is a light strategic layer to how you build Bob between sections. Two difficulty settings round out the options: Normal gives you three lives with checkpoints, while Hardcore strips it back to a single life with no safety net. Here is the honest tension with DragoDino. The mechanical framework is thoughtful. The play-style flexibility is real: speed-runners who only chase the blue diamonds to open the next section and completionists hunting every coin, scroll, and puzzle piece are both genuinely served by how the levels are structured. The visual style is consistently appealing, and the jaunty soundtrack fits the mood without overstaying its welcome. But reviewers across multiple platforms have pointed to the same cluster of problems: a punishing death system that, on a game over, sends you all the way back to level one and strips all your power-ups; platform physics that never quite feel reliable enough for a game that demands precision; and loading screens between levels that can stretch to three minutes or more on some versions. For a 2D roguelike, those load times hit harder than they would in almost any other genre, because the whole rhythm of play depends on quick retry loops. That rhythm keeps getting interrupted before it can build. Local co-op is the mode where DragoDino finds its best version of itself. A second player can drop in and out freely, and having a partner both accelerates the diamond hunt and softens the punishment of the health system by enabling revives. Solo, the game's shallowness surfaces faster, and the repetition of the collect-unlock-ascend loop becomes visible within a couple of hours. There are boss fights tucked into the campaign and around fifty enemy types to encounter across the ten levels, but the enemy variety does not always translate into genuine tactical variety in moment-to-moment play. This is a debut, and it reads like one: the ambition is there, the polish is not quite.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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