Dinolords blends action RPG combat and RTS battles in a medieval England overrun with dinosaurs, and surprisingly it's even cooler than that sounds

Nearly two years ago now, Dinolords was announced with one of the all-time great videogame trailers. 55 seconds of seemingly straightforward, medieval strategy and city-building, suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a viking riding a T rex while heavy metal music plays.

It's an irresistible premise—essentially Age of Empires 2 with dinosaurs. But the question with any elevator pitch like that is: once you've revealed the gimmick, is there any more to it?

So it was lovely to discover, during a 30 minute hands-on at GamesCom last week, that not only is Dinolords packed with surprises as delightful as that first T rex reveal, it's also mechanically a much more creative and interesting game than you're likely expecting.

Despite appearances, it's as much an action RPG as it is an RTS. That's an unusual hybrid—I'd struggle to name many other examples past Brütal Legend—and a lot of what Dinlords does to blend the two genres feels genuinely new.

Your perspective is locked to your character—an English lord equipped with a sword, a bow, a few special abilities, and of course a velociraptor mount (my first little squeal of delight during the demo). You can pop out into a wider view to manage construction more easily or direct troops more finely, but you can't move the camera away from your hero, so they always need to be in the heart of the action.

You can get strategic, moving different soldier types around the battlefield while you fight, but equally it's easy to keep it simple. A hotkey press lets you simply gather all soldiers in an area and get them following you, and from there they've got rather more AI than your average RTS troops—they're perfectly capable of battling enemies without micro-management.

That can free you up to focus on getting the most out of your hero—getting hits in on key targets, dodge-rolling out of the way of enemy attacks, and using powers like a dramatic charge attack and a handy superhero leap that ends in a ground slam. Deal enough damage to a major enemy, and you can perform an execution to finish them off, which also heals all your minions in the area—a really neat bit of synergy between the two genres.

There's always something to do. Your character can even run around your settlements hammering on construction sites to raise buildings faster, but the focused perspective makes the experience more accessible. Only being able to wage war on one front at a time means you don't need to be clicking around like a frenzied Starcraft micro god just to keep up.

It helps, too, that the focus is on scenario-driven singleplayer—in the case of my demo, I had to travel across the map to a castle town, fix it up and recruit an army, and then defend its walls against waves of dinosaur-riding vikings. These are early days for the level design in the game, but at this stage it puts me more in mind of games like They Are Billions or Cataclismo than it does traditional RTS offerings, and it's easy to see it appealing beyond the usual genre audience.

Let's get back to the dinosaurs

All along the way, there are dinosaur delights. Far more than just another class of units to recruit, dinos are baked right into the game's DNA, and even just in 30 minutes I felt like I was constantly experiencing child-like joy at finding some new way they click into the formula.

Jumping onto a velociraptor steed lets me speed between different settlements and battlefronts. Then I'm hunting for nests in the forest so I can steal the giant eggs and use them to recruit new dino species. As I set up my base, I'm enchanted to see that the lumber mill sends out a specially trained triceratops to uproot the trees and carry them back for sawing into logs.

I'm advised that it'd be a good idea to set up a couple of sentry towers before the vikings arrive, and surprise! They're actually pteranadon roosts, so instead of doing something boring like shooting arrows at invaders, they send out giant lizard-birds to grab them, fly them up into the air, and drop them screaming back to the ground.

When the vikings arrive, each wave presents its own dino-problem in need of solving—from burrowing 'mudbacks' who can tunnel under my walls to lumbering ankylosaurus battering rams with sweeping AoE tail attacks to dodge through.

It would have been easy to just dryly slot these prehistoric beasts into the standard rock-paper-scissors unit interactions of classic RTS play, but Dinolords instead makes them the spice that peppers exciting new life into old formulas. Even visually they pop against the medieval backdrop—instead of bearing green or grey hides, they saunter around with brightly-coloured feathers and tropical markings.

They're like toys come to life, and the result is a game that has the joyful enthusiasm of a kid bashing all their action figures together. During my session I felt like I could practically hear a running narration from my eight-year-old self: "This is the heroic knight and he's arrived to save the day and then an evil T rex appears and roars at him and then he has to do a BIG leap off the castle walls to fight it!!!"

There's definitely some more grown-up work to be done, however. This 30 minute slice was bursting with good ideas but a bit rough around the edges when it came to mission structure and the feel of the combat. The thrill of riding a velociraptor is blunted a bit when you discover it's incredibly difficult to hit anything from dino-back, for example.

So I'm pleased to hear it when the developer explains the plan is to head to early access on Steam next year, with a closed alpha before that. That seems like just the right approach—throw this bundle of great concepts out to players, let them mess about with it all, and then refine the core experience from there with all their feedback.

I was accompanied for my playthrough by three of the game's developers, and it couldn't have been more obvious how psyched they are for that journey. I can say pretty confidently that I've never met three grown men more thrilled to talk to me about dinosaurs, and even at this early stage, it's that infectious enthusiasm that suffuses Dinolords' DNA.