Original Release: David Mills, 2023, PC/Mac
Roam an open world collecting dino pelts with the help of heavily armed hookers
Cadillacs & Dinowhores (PC, David Mills, 2023)
Where to Buy: Freeware (download at itch.io)
Review by: Master-B
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs is an obscure cult comic from the 80s and 90s that had a moment in the sun during the great marketing quest to dig up the next TMNT, winding up having a short-lived cartoon on CBS and two games: an arcade beat-em-up and a Sega CD rail shooter that Elon Musk apparently did some small amount of programming work for during his brief vidya game career. I’m not sure whether to call this one a “fan game,” but it does take the basic setting and themes of the series and puts them to work in a game that kinda reminds me of the open-world portions of Brutal Legend, just without the ability to exit your vehicle and roaming dinosaurs as enemies instead of viking metalheads.
It’s sort of an inversion of the mainstream stories, which had a team of do-wells in post-apocalyptia fighting against an organization of corporate greedheads who want to return to the old ways of ecoloogical plunder and abuse the newly-returned dinosaurs and such. This game puts you in the shoes of a not-so-do-well freelance dinosaur hunter of some sort, who takes commands from a demonic imp and has a surprisingly pragmatic taste for whores.
He might not share the values of the main characters of the series, but he does share the love for restored muscle cars. You’re stuck in one for the duration of the game, fortunately it has unlimited gas and also a small machine gun mounted to the hood with infinite ammo. That’s our only toolset for taking down dinosaurs, fortunately there are also whores in the picture. They’re not dinosaurs, they look more like extras from Jet Grind Radio. But whores provide extra service in this grim future, packing a powerful weapon and hanging out the window to aid you in rendering any dinos you encounter into nublets.
It’s also true to the roots of the comic in that it’s extra violent. The dinos kinda just disappear in a peaceful puff, but things aren’t so easy for your main character if you let them get too close to the car. The extant demo version has two types of dinos roaming about: smaller and faster raptors, which jump on top of your car and eyeball you through a window before biting your head off, and T-Rex, which simply pull you out of the car for a Jurassic Park-esque insta-kill when they close in. You have a little time to do a “door attack” to off the raptors once they pounce on you, but the T-Rex just makes a gory feast out of you (and then looks quite smug about it afterward).
The “adult content” portion is much more tame by comparison. In fact, it’s one of our rare non-nude category games as the camera is always strategically positioned so that you can’t really see anything at all (in GTA style). Sexytime is limited to forcing the hookers to give you a beej, the completion of which seems to grant you an invincibility field for a few seconds.
The game is clearly labeled as a “demo” at this point and not complete, but there isn’t a whole lot to do and the gameplay could definitely still use some tweaking. It’s a basic but cool environment; you’re stuck on some island with chunks of coastal city ruins, I drove all around its edges but there’s nothing to find but randomly generated roaming dinos and the occasional whore hanging out waiting to be picked up. The car handling is pretty good, but due to the nature of your machine gun you have to awkwardly steer around to aim it at dinos. That by itself is usually not sufficient to gun them down before getting run down, fortunately all the whores seem to have hyper-powered weapons that usually do the job by themselves. Your biggest danger is getting snuck up on by one dino while you’re targeting another.
The developer mentions adding missions in a video they’ve posted, so I guess more is planned for this, but there doesn’t seem to be much to do for now but take in the environment and basics of gameplay. That, and cruise around listening to the greatest hits of Cumtown singing about your gay dad on the radio (I guess this is staying freeware). I dunno if they’ll actually get to fleshing the game out more as they seem to have like 30 freeware game projects listed, I hope they do though, this is a pretty promising start and would be good just as a “score attack” type game with a little tightening up.
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