Review #756: Power Rangers - Dino Thunder

 Feels like ancient software that should've gone the way of the Dinosaurs.

 I don't know how, but Power Rangers games on the Gameboy Advance keep finding ways of letting me down, just when I think I've seen every way these games can suck.... they find new ones. Case in point, Power Rangers Dino Thunder, yet another platforming beat'em up game.

 In this game you play as the Red, Yellow and Blue Rangers while taking orders from a non-playable Black Ranger as well as sporadic appearances of an unplayable White Ranger. Lame. All three characters are virtually identical, with only their weapon attack animations being different, but behaving pretty much the same way. Each stage has you playing as a different member of the trio, and there's about 5 stages per character, for a total of 15 or so stages, making it relatively lengthy for a Power Rangers game.

 The game looks like the successor to the Ninja Storm game, featuring similar large, ugly digitized sprites and stiff gameplay. B is your basic three hit combo, B+UP is a weapon attack and B+Down is another weapon attack. You can collect coins on every stage, and for every 10 coins you can use your Super Move with the R button. Combat feels clunkier than in Ninja Storm, at first I was having trouble getting the 3-hit combo to come out and couldn't figure out what was going on.... turns you have to mash the B button really fast for it to come out, regardless, your best attacks are the weapon attacks and flying kicks, since they deal more damage than the useless 3 hit combo.

 Remember all those crappy Spider-man games on the GBA and DS? Remember what made them so bad? Well, this game follows that formula to a tee, being a scavenger hunt on mazelike levels. On the plus side, while you don't have a radar, the game reuses the same 5 levels over and over again, so eventually you'll learn the layout by heart and thus won't get lost... much. On the other side, the game reuses the same levels, with the same layouts, although with the objects of your hunt hidden in different places, over and over again, making for a very boring and repetitive game, pretty much what we've learnt to expect from these licensed snorefests. The Factory level is particularly bland, because falling down into the many, many pits will loops you back to the beginning of the stage. LAME.

 Zord Battles, of course, are a thing. This time around you pick from six different arms, 1 on each side, I mean, d'oh, and then do battle against enemies by tapping A or B to use your different arms. You might double tap left to back dash or hold back to block every now and then, but they are simple and not too awful. There are also 4 'connect the maze' minigames that are incredibly annoying because your character icon moves VERY slowly and the maze swaps tiles around randomly, or randomly takes time away from the timer, or other types of different bullcrap that turn these puzzles into annoyances. Clearing these puzzles is the only way to unlock new arms for your Zord.

 Power Rangers - Dino Thunders is clunky, poorly designed and boring, so... moving over....
 3.0 out of 10