Dinoblade Promo Shot
Image: Team Spino

Sometimes, all you need to build a game on is a silly idea. That's what happened when Jean Nguyen - animator on the likes of Ghost of Yotei and Call of Duty: Vanguard - shared some clips of a cool sword-fighting dinosaur he'd made. Peer pressure ensued, and eventually he was talked into turning his concept into something playable. Smash-cut past four years of independent part-time development and Dinoblade exists, a fully-formed Dino-swordfighting action RPG available to purchase and play today.

And yes, it should have been called DinoSword, but someone stole that one.

While catching some flak for its rough edges (it IS a part-time side-project for Team Spino), Dinoblade's demo was a massive hit and has been available on Steam ever since last October. The game is exactly what it looks like. You are a Spinosaurus, wielding a massive sword in your jaws, fighting your way through other dinosaurs (many of them also blade-wielders) on a quest to climb to the top of the food chain and perhaps escape the coming extinction of all cool sword dinosaurs.

The combat here is very Souls-inspired, with limited healing charges, a big focus on precise dodging, stamina management, and learning the (unsurprisingly) well-animated enemy attack patterns. Did I mention these are also magical dinosaurs? You can charge up heavy attacks to shoot big anime sword-beams (usually the domain of pointy-haired JRPG protagonists) and heal yourself with obligatory green magic sparkles, restocked at checkpoints.

Of course there's progression systems here too, giving you options to channel your dino-mana into an assortment of spells and special techniques that you unlock through spending experience and dino-boss souls. It is, in all regards, an indie souls-like. But with dinosaurs. Sword-fighting dinosaurs. And that will never not be cool. Honestly, sometimes that's all you need from a game, though I guess I would like to see a T-Rex swinging around an Ankylosaurus by the tail like a spiked flail... oh, no, wait, that's in one of the earlier trailers, too.

Video games are a perfectly daft medium, sometimes. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Dinoblade is out now for £17.75/$20, with a 10% launch discount available until July 30th. And if you're still not sold on the idea of magical dinosaurs having epic sword fights, then the Dinoblade demo is still available to play.