Terrible Lizards is about a random guy whose car just so happens to break down across the road from a corny dinosaur attraction on Route 66. He goes inside looking for help only to discover that everything is not as it seems. A dinosaur mascot costume barfing up black goo starts stalking him around the attractions before a real live actual dinosaur shows up and starts terrorizing him as well. It turns out the roadside attraction was built on top of an archeological site that was digging up dino bones to start with, but they discovered a mysterious black slime deep underground. And then horrific mutated dinosaurs showed up and freaking killed everyone. So, of course, your guy ends up falling down into the depths of this nightmare and blah blah blah.
I like that the game pulls a bit of a switch on you after it seems initially it is just going to be yet another scary mascot indie slop streamer bait game, but you get through the roadside attraction part and descend into the real game pretty quickly. There are only three enemies in the game - a brontosaurus, an allosaurus, and a dilophosaurus - but they are all horrifically mutated. They really are scary horrible monsters. I wish there were even more dinosaurs, if I'm being honest, but it's fine.
Another way the game subverts your expectations is that there isn't any combat. At all. Your only option is to run away from the monsters. Thankfully, the first-person-parkour platforming gameplay is really, really solid. For the most part, anyway, but we'll get to that. The game is really fast and responsive and running and jumping and wallrunning and swinging around and everything else you do feels really great. There is a very generous sort of magnetism to ledges and pipes and whatever so you magically grab on from very forgiving distances. The level designs are also very smart in that you can easily recognize and react to obstacles while you're running around at top speed, so you rarely have to stop and reset and realign yourself for the next jump. You just keep moving and jumping and flying around and it feels great. A lot of games with parkour don't do nearly as good of a job as Terrible Lizards does of keeping you moving smoothly.
The game isn't all just chases, though. In fact, there are only a handful of actual run-for-your-life-type escape sequences through it's 5 or so hour runtime. The rest of your time is spent with more leisurely platforming or finding items like fuses and dynamite to open the way forward. And there are a million collectible documents and audio tapes spread all over which is, say it with me kids, the absolutely worst way to tell the story in a video game. Good job kids, you got it right. The mix of mostly slow exploration with the handful of exhilarating chases generally works well here.
Except when it does not, in fact, work well at all. For as smooth and great as the platforming feels most of the time, it is still extremely prone to bugging out and not working properly. I'm talking, like, 20% of the time stuff just doesn't work. Your guy just won't grab ledges, or you'll get stuck on invisible walls, or the momentum bugs out and you don't fly as far as you should, and all sorts of other issues. And it never breaks in the same way twice in a row, so you'll occasionally encounter extremely buggy sections and you have no idea how to get through them because you don't even know what you're doing wrong. The absolute worst part is at the very end where, somehow, this game pushes the Series X harder than any other game in history and becomes a slide show. It is borderline unplayable unless you're a sicko and grind through it. Like me. The rest of the game is 4 hours long. Getting through the slide show that should be five minutes before the ending took me another hour by itself. It is insane how terrible it is.
It's a shame that it's so buggy and that ending section is so putrid, because the rest of Terrible Lizards is pretty solid. It looks and sounds good. The monsters look great and are genuinely scary. And the gameplay, for the 80% of the time it works perfectly and isn't bugging out, is insanely smooth and satisfying and fun. But the game does have issues that can absolutely ruin the experience and I don't blame you if you rage quit and never pick it up again. If it wasn't a Game Pass game and I actually paid $25 for it, I'd probably be rather negative about it, to be honest. But it IS a Game Pass game, so I still recommend giving it a try. And I can only assume it will be patched and the bugs worked out - and the ending section fixed - so by the time you play it you might have a better experience start to finish than I did. Terrible Lizards is worth playing, but be prepared for a bit of a mess at the moment.
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