Dino Master

If there's one true evergreen topic for grade school kids, it's how impossibly cool dinosaurs are. Somewhere just under the enormous beasts are the pint-sized, super-powered critters of Pokemon. What if there was a game that had you collecting your own army of oversized lizards and pitting them against your friends? Why, there would be riots on the playground.

But that's the deadly mix Dino Master is hoping to hit. You play as an archeologist, scampering around dangerous dig sites while looking for fossils. The best part is that you're unearthing these bones so you can recreate the dinos from scratch - just to have them fight each other for survival. Brilliant.

To find this buried treasure, you have to draw closed boxes on the dig site. When you complete a box (or any shape or size), that part of the earth is considered "searched," and if there's a skeleton hiding out down there, it'll show. Revealing the entire skeleton will give you one of the 100 dinosaur species in Dino Master.

Once the dino's out of the dirt, you can bring it back to life and plop it into battle mode. We're not sure on all the details, but it looks like you'll be choosing attacks (much like Pokemon) and sizing up which dino can stomp on the other. Its April release is obviously closing in, and if the puzzle/collecting gameplay hold up, this could be an unexpected sleeper hit.

Brett Elston

A fomer Executive Editor at GamesRadar, Brett also contributed content to many other Future gaming publications including Nintendo Power, PC Gamer and Official Xbox Magazine. Brett has worked at Capcom in several senior roles, is an experienced podcaster, and now works as a Senior Manager of Content Communications at PlayStation SIE.