Gigantosaurus The Game

I organise enough Saturday co-op nights to know the first question parents ask before buying a kids game: can four of us actually play this thing on the couch together? Gigantosaurus The Game technically says yes, and that answer comes with a lot of asterisks worth reading before you hand over your card. The core loop splits into two halves. The platforming side has you picking one of four dinosaur characters, Rocky, Tiny, Mazu or Bill, each carrying a distinct ability like climbing vines, assembling levers, or ramming obstacles. In single-player you cycle between them freely; in co-op, each person locks to one dinosaur, which is a tidy idea on paper. The main objective across the game's biomes is collecting dinosaur eggs and returning them to nests, alongside seeds and other scattered collectibles. That egg-ferrying routine starts charming and turns repetitive fast, partly because you carry exactly one egg at a time and walk it back manually every single trip. Younger kids, say four to seven years old and fans of the Disney Junior show, will likely not notice or care. Adults sitting alongside them will notice plenty. The kart-racing segments that bridge each platforming zone are genuinely the better half of the package. They are brisk, colourful, and come with speed boosts and shortcut hunting. Crucially, and this matters for co-op specifically, the racing stages actually use split-screen. The platforming sections do not. In the platforming co-op, the camera zooms out as players spread apart, and if anyone wanders too far the whole group gets teleported to a lead player, a system that the game frequently gets wrong. That is a real problem for the parent-and-child scenario this game is clearly designed for. PC players have also flagged controller setup headaches in local co-op, where getting a second gamepad recognised requires some profile-switching fiddling rather than a clean plug-and-play experience. The Metacritic consensus sits at 60, which feels fair if not generous. Technical complaints are consistent across platforms: occasional frame-rate dips when things get busy, objects popping out of existence as the camera closes in, and a map that is more hindrance than help. Voice acting from the show's cast is absent, replaced by a narrator, so kids familiar with the cartoon may notice something feels off. The final level, which asks each character to use their specific ability in sequence to rescue Giganto from a lava trap, shows a flash of what smarter design could have produced throughout. This is a game built for one audience: children aged roughly four to eight who watch the show and want to feel like they are inside it. For that audience it mostly delivers, with low difficulty, bright visuals, simple controls, and enough content to fill a couple of rainy afternoons. For everyone else sitting on the couch alongside them, it is a patience exercise. The racing segments make decent filler during those waits. The platforming, with its repetitive egg runs and chaotic shared camera, does not hold up for anyone past the target age. If your household already owns a proper kart racer and a LEGO game, there is little Gigantosaurus adds to the shelf that those two genres have not already covered better.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on Gigantosaurus The Game.