I say 'attacked', but right now the impression is that the other dinosaur simply walks over you, resulting in instant death. At your youngest, older raptors will simply ignore you, leaving you to fend for yourself, but once you reach adolescence you're deemed a rival for food sources and will be attacked if you get too close to a grown-up. Then there is the brutality of the early raptor lifecycle. You, as a raptor, are frail against this, although speed is on your side. A failed strike upon the armoured hide of a Triceratops enrages the creature, and it turns its mighty horns towards you and gives chase. There are brief flashes of what this game could become. Later on in development, the plan is to make some of these species playable, though I suspect this is not a cheap endeavour and will depend on Early Access going well. The first sighting of a triceratops through the trees is a treat, getting snatched into the water by an amphibious, croc-like creature is briefly horrifying, and, if you're really lucky, you might catch sight of Ian Tyrannosaur stomping about the place. Saurian isn't particularly well-optimised yet, and there's some roughness to the environments, but it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that it could wind up with better lighting and frame rates. but not that bad, as though the central finding/feeding activities get old fast, the controls feel simultaneously treacly and mechanical rather than dino-fluid and there isn't much AI to speak of, the clearly meticulously-researched beasts look pretty damn decent, and move well too. For this initial release, I'm afraid we're rather closer to. happening frequently and differently enough to offset the repetition inherent in skulking about finding food and water in order stop your status metres dropping too low. Right now, Saurian depends on this sort of moment. Then there's Maxis' SimAnt, which I would cautiously posit is more legendary than it is truly loved. We've got the earlier stages of Spore, but there's a good reason they only last a portion of the campaign - as any parent knows, watching something feed and grow is only entertaining for so long. We've got Shelter, which leaned heavily on cub-death tragedy in order to lend itself drama and characterisation. There are, after all, very few games which have pulled off animal simulation truly successfully. Wild animal lifestyle, no matter how large and toothy, inherently involves grinding through the same activities. My chief concern, after a few hours with Saurian, is less that it currently has only one playable species (a semi-feathered Dakotaraptor) and little to do beyond roaming around a large, unconstrained prehistoric environment looking for lizards to eat and water to drink, and more about whether it can find the fun no matter how many dinos wind up in it. The release version so far is fairly short on things to do, but has some meticulously-recreated dinos, the option to pick a doomed fight with a Triceratops, and the significant risk of getting eaten by your own mother. Which is to say, a dinosaur life simulation based on contemporary science's best guess as the thunder lizards' lifestyle. Saurian meanwhile, new on Steam Early Access this week after a successful Kickstarting a while back, is a survival game that similarly appeals to our first childhood love, but wants to be more Walking With Dinosaurs than Jurassic World. Ark: Survival Evolved, the current king of dinosaur hill, is not a simulation of any kind.
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