Paleo Pines starts with the traditional formula of a farming simulator, immediately handing you some derelict land to call home and placing you amongst an entirely new town to explore, but introduces a new element as its unique selling point: dinosaurs. There’s going to be no collecting cows and chickens, or riding around the town on the back of a horse, here; you’re armed with a huge variety of Cretaceous and Jurassic helpers. 

It’s certainly a quirk within the genre, and it's a great basis to set itself apart from what is starting to feel like an oversaturated market of games with the same mechanics and content. However, despite its obvious oddity, there’s something about developer Italic Pig’s Paleo Pines that still glistens with familiarity and raises the question of whether its inhabitants are enough to set it apart from the competition.  

Rise and grind 

You start your time with Paleo Pines by creating your character, immediately promoting a sense of ownership and personality, rather than just picking from a series of preset avatars like older Story of Seasons or Harvest Moon games would have you do.

Armed with your first dinosaur, a blue parasaurolophus called Lucky whom the central story revolves around, you’re soon introduced to some of Paleo Pines’ quite humorous inhabitants and their dino companions. They quickly share their surprise with Lucky, who is apparently an incredibly rare species since the other parasaurolophus’ has gone missing, and it becomes your main aim to uncover their whereabouts. However, before you set off on this adventure, you need to visit your new ranch. 

Your land is entirely abandoned with a lot of debris to clean up from the get-go. If you’ve played any Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley, this won’t be breaking news. This process is the backbone of farming sims, but it’s still the best way to get you familiar with getting set up on your farm and getting familiar with the space. But although it is an essential step, it feels like there’s not much of an attempt to shake things up and make them more unique or exciting, so it ends up feeling pretty long-winded when you’re just desperate to jump in and start collecting dinosaurs.

Your stamina also depletes incredibly quickly, as does Lucky’s, so days will be pretty short if you’re spending more time on your farm than you are walking around and meeting the townsfolk. I always find the stamina to be one of the downfalls of farming sims since so much is expected of you each day, be it through crop cultivation, mining, or clearing up your land, and there aren't many obvious pointers within the game to help you know how to replenish this. 

Eventually, you can somewhat automate your farm depending on which dinosaur species you keep around - incredibly useful if you don’t want to waste your own stamina cultivating crops. Each species comes with its own perks, such as the triceratops which helps till multiple squares at once, or the velociraptor which helps harvest crops once fully grown, however, you will find clearing your space and getting to grips with the taming process can become quite the timesink. 

Same old same old 

Even though you’ve got the excitement of dinosaurs to play with, the day-to-day routine is still pretty rigid. You wake up, water any crops you’ve got growing, and try to clear as much space as possible as you get started. Unfortunately, Paleo Pines doesn’t offer much to shake things up from this traditional routine as you get set up, but at least you’ve got a spare pair of talons to help out. 

Lucky is your key to getting things cleared since their presence basically grants you a secondary stamina bar, but you’ll also need to rely on it as a mount if you prioritize getting places quickly. Taking the size of the map into account as well, you’ll probably want to consider this once you start straying from home territory.

However, you can’t rely exclusively on Lucky to help you around the farm. You’ll learn to rely on a variety of old tools pretty quickly, like a shovel and a hoe which will help you get the farming side of things set up. You’ll also get gifted a few packs of seeds so you can start to get some income, but this takes time to set up and feels like a drip feed if you stick to one crop type. 

The journal does help keep things slightly more exciting though, and you’re able to take on quests for the townsfolk to keep your daily adventure more productive alongside following the main story. These tasks usually revolve around collecting certain foragable items or growing specific crops for a recipe. They’re fairly passive quests, and the freedom to do what you want makes the experience feel a lot more relaxing, but it’s nice to have the option to follow a little more structure. 

Dinos for days

Where the game does shine is through it’s dinosaur interaction sections where you can really get to grips with the critters that sold you the game in the first place. However, it’s not as easy as walking into a store and purchasing new dinosaurs to add to your journal and ranch. Instead, a creature-collecting element is introduced, and with nothing but a flute to attract their attention you’re tasked with befriending and logging your experience with said creatures in a Pokemon-esque fashion. 

Across the large map, you’ll come across what feels like hundreds of species of dinosaurs that spawn in the overworld, and once you’ve got settled into the town you’ll be free to go and wrangle as many as you can home on your ranch. These species will spawn in the same place each day, so if there’s a certain dinosaur you want to collect then you’ll know where to head without being sent on a wild goose chase. But while this sounds pretty mundane and repetitive, there’s still an exciting addition to the collection element. 

Rather than offering the same dinosaurs with the same patterns and colors each day, there’s a chance you’ll encounter new variations, some boasting a different ‘rarity’ to more common designs, almost like the Paleo Pines equivalent to shiny Pokemon. They don’t boast any sort of skill or stat boosts, but they are neat to look at. Your journal is the key to logging each color pattern and nature, which is why it’s essential to keep exploring even when you feel satisfied with your collection. 

But, as easy as it is to befriend these beasties, it’s much more challenging to care for them. Rather than a traditional farming simulator that will have you throwing wheat and seeds at your animals and calling it a day, each species of dinosaur you house on your ranch has specific requirements for pen space, diet, and living preferences which you need to keep in mind if you don’t want them to get upset because they will leave your ranch. 

If you’re a superfan of dinosaurs and farming simulators, Paleo Pines is a dream come true. It’s relaxing and brimming with cute critters, yet still offers structure when you need a little more story to follow during your day-to-day, but it’s hard to shake the close comparison to other farming simulators despite these differences.  

Accessibility 

Accessibility settings within Paleo Pines include features such as turning off the general blur, and the ability to increase text size for dialogue boxes, but this is done through a simple yes/no option rather than a slider to completely personalize it to your preference. Character speed can also be slowed down through this menu, alongside high contrast mode.

Although accessibility settings already offer numerous features to toggle, a number of in-game elements have been curated with accessibility in mind without the need for an additional menu. 

For example, visual cues have been implemented within the game by default for sections such as analyzing dinosaur friend calls rather than just relying on the audio, and the colors used as these bubbles have been selected to take into account color blindness, as shared to Twitter and Steam by Italic Pig. 

How we reviewed Paleo Pines 

I’m not a stranger when it comes to farming simulators. I’ve spent what I can only assume are thousands of hours watering crops, tilling soil, and fawning over chubby-looking animal sprites in the hopes that I can make enough money for another bag of seeds. So, I’m confident in calling myself a farming simulator aficionado and knowing what makes such a game worth checking out. 

I played Paleo Pines for around 25 hours on PC with a mix of mouse and keyboard and controller, completing pages of quests and collecting numerous dinosaurs to add to my ranch. I’ve explored the map, met its cast of characters, and befriended a huge array of dinosaurs across each season and period in the game. After completing almost a year of in-game time, I got incredibly familiar with its routine and learned how to optimize my farm to make each day as productive as possible. 

For more adventures like Paleo Pines, you might want to turn your attention toward the best indie games. However, we've also got a list of the best story games if you want something slightly more narrative-driven. 

Forget about the tense stealth and bombastic firefights that punctuate first-person shooter Payday 3, the heist-shooter is actually a game about logistics. Each level has you casing up a building full of items that need to be put in bags and then moved to a waiting transport. Chuck enough of these bags - in an ideal world you’ll want all of them but that’s not required - to safety and you’ll escape too, getting a cut of the heist for your troubles. 

Really you’re just a house mover with military firepower. But it’s this constant need to keep an eye on things that sets Payday 3 apart from shooter contemporaries and marks it as an actual heist sim, delivering on the fantasy of being a bank robber and taking on bespoke, high-risk heists. 

Most of Payday 3’s best moments focus on your loot being moved too. Complete a stealth run of the game’s first level, the Secure Capital bank, and one or two of your four-man team will be walking bags calmly, as civilians, to the van idling in the parking lot, an entire vault’s load of cash being moved out under the watchful eye of the pathologically inattentive guard. In another context, chucking bags of cocaine and jewelry out of a penthouse window to the balcony below while gunfire explodes off of every surface is a different tension but creates the same feeling of elation as the daisy chain of loot slowly makes its way to a waiting helicopter. 

Every heist in Payday 3 has unique mechanics, and most of them are entirely drill-free, which is excellent for players who hated spending the entirety of their time with Payday 2 sick of listening to the wail of a drill that needs repairing. You’ll still drill the occasional lock, but now you’re most often using thermal lances, thermite, or the low-tech method of just straight up picking a lock or cracking a safe instead.  

Criminal empire 

There are three different approaches to Payday 3, and if you’re rumbled or you have no patience you’ll likely fall back on the loud and proud approach, which has you strapping on your mask and cutting loose with the game’s arsenal. Payday 3’s weaponry feels somewhat truncated - there are only two shotguns, for example - but most of the guns are fairly satisfying and each has detailed customization options. You can equip attachments to make your gun handle differently, and also paint it a matching color to your mask, should you prefer. 

Shootouts are often close-range affairs and see you spraying weapons from the hip as you move from room to room. While there are marksman rifles and snipers, the opportunity to use them feels fairly limited due to the fact special enemies can disable solo players, meaning that if you’re hiding out on a sniper perch you’re opening yourself up to being tazed or bashed upside the head by the terrifying cloakers - invisible enemies that ambush you like something out of a horror game. So, you’ll be primarily pushing around enclosed urban spaces, and I found I quickly had an affinity for the shotgun and submachine guns, which both allowed me to make a small area very undesirable to opponents.

Not that they’d realize - the AI is of middling to low intelligence and will often charge you with the self-preservation instincts of a TikToker that has just heard of a hot new way to die and wants to try it out for themselves.

The other two approaches are variations on the same stealthy theme. There’s a social stealth that plays out a little like Hitman, as you have no mask, and you’re just skulking around in public areas and testing the boundaries of restricted zones while trying to avoid cameras and guards. Then there’s the mask-on, gun-out stealth. This’ll feel familiar to players of Payday 2 and mostly involves strolling around maps cuffing civilians and taking out guards to answer their radios. You also have unlimited cable ties in this game, because hostage management is a larger part of the process.  

Little hand says it’s time to rock and roll 

Stealth feels much easier compared to Payday 2 which personally works for me. A perfect stealth heist in Payday 2 was nearly impossible unless you were super coordinated, but here it feels like you can easily lock down rooms by bursting into them with a gun. It’s fairly forgiving but that accessibility does make it feel less rewarding. 

However, you’ll want to follow the stealth path as much as possible because, well, it’s easier and can net you more money, but it’s also where you’ll get to see most of Payday 3’s improvements over its predecessor. Seven of the eight heists included in the base game can be stealthed from end to end, and while the Secure Capital bank of the first level is a fairly mundane heist compared to what comes later, each of these seven has a fascinating path you can carve through the level on your way to getting the loot. 

The shooting is, by comparison, fairly uninteresting and feels like a punishment for getting the stealth route wrong. The full-auto weapons are nearly constantly out of ammunition as the ammo pools are quite limited and it’s hard to get enough ammunition to keep them fed - so it feels like there’s a strong case to use the marksman rifles or shotguns. Except that there’s only one pump action shotgun and the double-barrelled shotgun seems like it doesn’t have the ability to put out as much damage as you need with the swarm of police. 

Unlike previous games in the series, Payday 3 can be played and enjoyed as a solo or duo player. The bots wisely stay outside hanging out during the stealth sections, but are competent partners during firefights and will chuck down bags of ammo, health, or armor when needed in addition to reviving you and doing what they can in firefights. It’s still a better game with a coordinated group of four players, but it isn’t a deal breaker in the way it is for many of these four-player co-op games.

I think Payday 3 is a solid foundation and given the decade the team worked on Payday 2 there’s no reason to believe that this game won’t also become stuffed with DLC, licensed content, and new heists until it’s a veritable paradise for would-be heisters. However, as it stands there’s just not enough game here and what there is feels a little less enjoyable than Payday 2, despite the extra polish. The game shipping with eight heists and being completable on the normal difficulty in just a few short hours left me feeling a bit cold.

But hey, at least they got rid of that stupid offshore account thing, so the cash you rake in from the heists is all yours to spend on silly masks.

Accessibility features  

There’s no dedicated accessibility menu, but there are toggle options for things like crouching or aiming down sights, while there’s also something to reduce weapon sway. 

There are colorblind options for those with protanomaly, deuteranomaly, and tritanomaly, with a slider to scale the assists up or down depending on sensitivity. This is accompanied by a series of different images so you can see what’s changing in real-time. 

 How we reviewed Payday 3

I played Payday 3 for 20 hours, tackling every heist in the game. I completed several heists in full stealth on normal difficulty but was unable to manage this in the harder difficulties. I also played with four or five of the different weapons in the game, and played solo, with another player, and in a four-man team.  

If you enjoy the Payday series, you might want to check out the best FPS games, or the best co-op games for an experience to share.