Dino Trauma is a retraux-style First-Person Shooter developed by the indie company Phobia Interactive, one inspired by the dinosaur and FPS craze from the mid-90s - with the game's developers citing various classic dinosaur-themed media like Jurassic Park, Dino Crisis and Turok as inspiration.
The game pretty much runs on as much an Excuse Plot as it allows; in a genetics manipulation laboratory belonging to Genomza Industries, (a MegaCorp and blatant expy of InGEN from the Jurassic films) the cryogenically-frozen dinosaurs have awakened and is on an unstoppable rampage. You're an employee caught in the rampage, and you'll need to find an exit.
Right now, an Early Access of the game is available online; with a complete version expected sometime around October 2023.
Dino Trauma (Early Access) Contain Examples of:
- Automatic Crossbows: One of the weapons you can obtain, and it could deal some devastating damage to dinosaurs despite firing arrows.
- Boring, but Practical: You can get hold of some crazy exotic weapons like dual Uzis, crossbows and a laser rifle, but 90% of your dino-killing will be done by the basic peashooter pistol and ye olde pump shotgun because 9mm bullets and shotgun shells are so readily available. Especially the shotgun, which can load up to 3 shells and fire them all at once for really heavy damage - even the big baddie dinos will sweat over it.
- Dumb Dinos: Most of the dinosaurs are pretty mindless...
- Special mention to the stegosaurus, the first Warm-Up Boss who only knows how to wander about in circles, even when it's being shot at. It will attack you if you're in front of it, but if you're out of sight the stegosaur will somehow continue trying to look over it's shoulder while you blast away with your shotgun. It gets defeated asily in under a minute because of this.
- The second boss, a brachisaurus, isn't any better, lumbering slowly while wondering what hits it as you take aim. Stay out of sight and the dinosaur will be swiftly eliminated.
- Emergency Weapon: If you're completely and utterly out of ammo and options, you can attack a dinosaur up close with either the cattle prod, or the Mighty Boot via the "Q" key.
- Man-Eating Plant: Not in the early access, but the trailer for the final product shows a giant pitcher plant with fangs for petals making a chomping motion at the player.
- Medium Blending: Early in the game, you can find a computer monitor playing clips from Night of the Living Dead (1968), which is in live-action instead of pixelated like the game's usual graphics. The same film can be seen on a still-active television in the lounge.
- Memory Match Mini-Game: One early area has a computer monitor with a card-matching game that you can play with... after killing a bunch of velociraptors and coelopysises in the room.
- Mighty Glacier: Generally speaking, the bigger a dino is, the slower on its feet it will be. But bigger dinos also take more of your health if they get a chomp out of you and they need more ordnance pumped into them before they kick the bucket. So be careful.
- Raptor Attack: Expectedly, like almost all dinosaur-related action games out there the first enemies you fight are velociraptors. They're portrayed as the featherless varieties made popular by the Jurassic Park series.
- Shock Stick: The first weapon you obtain is a cattle prod that stuns dinosaurs momentarily, though it's not of much use against larger dinosaur enemies.
- Shooting Gallery: Between battling dinosaurs, you can come across a (somehow) still-functioning shooting gallery. Shooting enough targets will cause a nearby vault to unlock and present you a pistol upgrade.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: A pump shotgun is one of the first weapons you can get. It's Boring, but Practical because while you need to reload each shell one at a time with the reload key, the ammo is plentiful and being able to fire up to 3 shells at once lets it punch holes in even the larger and nastier dinosaur types.
- Shout-Out: There's not much to your Featureless Protagonist except they're apparently a white male named Agent Grant. Subtle.
- Skewed Priorities: You're in a bio-lab filled with hostile dinosaurs, but sure, it's perfectly fine to stop looking for a way out and play around in the arcade, watch some old movies in the still-active monitors, or kill time in the shooting range. Obviously. The game doesn't exactly urge you to hurry either, so you can simply chill around without any issues.
- Terrifying Tyrannosaur: In the Early Access, a T-Rex serves as the demo's last and most difficult boss. The full version is expected to have more of them.
- Terror-dactyl: In outdoor areas, expect pterosaurs to constantly swoop from above and attack you with their beaks. Like every other dinosaur in the game they're hostile by default.
