Dininho Space Adventure

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

Dininho Space Adventure is a family-friendly Shmup released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game takes a cutesy approach to the genre, with players taking the role of a cartoony dinosaur who hops into a spaceship to go on a journey to another planet.

The presentation here is adorable, with cute, colorful characters in an art style that’s pretty appealing, with a cute chiptune soundtrack that fits well and gives this game a sort of old-school charm. Unfortunately, the enemies can occasionally blend into the background, which makes things frustrating at times.

As for the gameplay, this is a fairly simple take on the genre. Players can upgrade their ship permanently in the game menus using coins they earn in-game, but other than that, there’s not much here to talk about.

Well, there are a few downsides, unfortunately. For one thing, your ship moves at an agonizingly slow speed, something that cannot be upgraded in-menu. You can get speed-up power-ups in stages, but those only appear randomly, and are not common enough to offset the problem.

Another issue is that because of the ship upgrades, the game gradually scales up the difficulty of levels and the amount of hits enemies take, but this scaling up happens much faster than players will earn coins to upgrade, forcing players to go back to earlier levels to grind. Given how simplistic the gameplay is here, that’s extra-frustrating.

As a result, while Dininho Space Adventure had potential to be a fun and simple Shmup, it ends up being a slow-placed slog and a grind. And while it’s not a horrible entry in the genre, it’s not a good one, and certainly not one I’d recommend with the wealth of better options on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Dininho Space Adventure is a cartoony, family-friendly Shmup. This is a fairly simple entry in the genre, and to make things worse your ship is slow as molasses and the game pushes players to do a lot of grinding to progress. Don’t buy this game when there are so many better choices on the Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C-

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