We review a wide variety of game titles here at Game Chronicles including ones that you wouldn’t exactly classify as much of a videogame by industry standards like educational games. We pride ourselves though in being diverse having covered more than just AAA fare over the years and giving even the most indie game possible a fair go. Such is the way with the downloadable dinosaur themed trivia title Dinox for the Nintendo Wii U which is not a dinosaur themed shooter as one might think.
Dinosaurs are something that pretty much everyone can get behind, as generally children (especially but not limited to boys) go through a stage growing up where they are absolutely fascinated with these gigantic beasts. Some of those children then grow up to go into careers where they spend their lives devoted to learning more about these terrifying (thanks Jurassic Park, seriously though, I love you) but diverse creatures. For those of us not ready to go out into the world of paleontology there have been several documentaries made over the years to give us a look into the lives of dinosaurs. This includes the widely popular 1999 BBC presentation “Walking with Dinosaurs” from which Codix Games gets all the footage used in Dinox.
Trivia games, like many edutainment titles, are always a tricky genre to cover as most of the relevant checklists we look for are not really valid for these. The biggest thing trivia games must excel at is keeping you interested and giving you enough content so that you don’t quickly memorize the questions by heart. Dinox does manage to do both of these in equal measure though it does stumble in a few areas which ill touch on later.
Dinox can be played alone or with 3 other players using a combination of the Wii U gamepad, Wii U Pro Controller or Wii Remote competing against each other to answer questions correctly. Before you get into the questions though, you and the other players choose one of only 4 dinosaurs to act as your avatar of sorts. There are 3 different difficulties of questions to choose from that are selected from a pool of 900 or so trivia question that all precede a video where you much watch or listen to closely and then choose the correct answer for a set of three options.
There honestly isn’t really a huge difference at all as far as the questions and difficulties go through the hardest difficulty throws a third option where you have to think about what is being said or shown before choosing your answer. The biggest thing that got to me about Dinox is something that seems to pop up in every trivia game I’ve ever played, but more so here is that more than a few questions had almost nothing to do with the video clip that preceded it. Seriously why is this a thing?
That annoyance aside, Dinox does contain some pretty interesting trivia information for long time dinosaur fans and even the newly interested in every family making this a nice and relatively inexpensive (compared to the actual DVD series collection) way to learn about your favorite dinosaurs and even some you may not even heard of. The problem is replay value as you ultimately run out of incentive to play more than a handful of times unless this is being used as a school learning tool which is a great idea. The main objective of the game is to be the first one (or only one if soloing) to complete the dinosaur bone model of your chosen dinosaur before anyone else by correctly answering 10 questions that reward you with a piece of the model with each correct answer.
Once you unlock each of your dinosaur models you can view them in the Gallery where you can view them in larger detail and even learn a few things about each one. I’m kind of disappointed that there weren’t more dinosaurs to construct, as that would have definitely added to replay value as there is little else to do.
Even the presentation of Dinox is very minimal with little flair as far as graphics go. The menus and interface for navigating the game and answering the questions are really clean and aside from that somewhat annoying Dinox watermark in the upper left corner during EVERY video the game looks good on both the TV screen and the Wii U Gamepad. The audio for the videos is really clear and easily heard and luckily do not come out simultaneously of the gamepad’s built-in speaker and the TV though Dinox does support playing it entirely on the gamepad screen when playing alone.
Overall Dinox is a fun title educational trivia game that was enjoyable for a while before I quickly lost interest after unlocking all the dinosaur models. Playing this with some family members is a lot of fun and if you have a few young ones joining in that is where Dinox ultimately shines. So, if you really love dinosaurs or have young ones discovering them for the very first time then Dinox is worth checking out for the Wii U. It’s only $5 at the Nintendo eShop.
