A Spinosaurus with a giant sword that parries like Sekiro and fights T-Rexes armed with sheet metal. Dinoblade is a meme turned real soulslike, and it holds up.
Alexandrosse
InsertCoins.press Score
8/10
Verdict
Recommended
Let's be honest for a second: however old we get, there's still a five-year-old deep inside us who, when shown a dinosaur, says yes without thinking. So when that dinosaur is a Spinosaurus wielding a sword twice its size and parrying blows like Sekiro, the question is no longer whether we're sold. We are. Dinoblade was born from a viral meme, and it could have stopped at the joke. Except it had the nerve to turn into a real soulslike, and that's where it gets serious.
Dinoblade is a soulslike action-RPG developed by a small studio and available on PC since 23 July 2026, after a demo that sent the counters through the roof. You play a young Spinosaurus armed with an oversized sword, thrown into a prehistoric world populated by equally warlike dinosaurs. The project started from an absurd image that went viral, and the studio was smart enough to take the joke seriously: more than 500,000 Steam wishlists before launch, proof we're not the only ones who kept our inner child. The promise is simple: dinosaurs, big swords, and screen-shaking boss fights.
What surprises is that Dinoblade doesn't rest on its funny concept. Its combat system is built on parry and posture, in the direct lineage of Sekiro rather than the dodge-and-stamina model of Dark Souls. In practice, you don't flee blows, you read and return them: each successful parry builds toward the counter and rewards aggression. The game pushes you to stay in contact, learn the opponent's chains and break their guard, in a nervous rhythm that demands reading and composure. It's demanding, it's precise, and it's nothing like the parody you might have feared.
The real show is the bosses. Each territory is guarded by an Alpha, and the studio clearly had fun making these encounters as memorable as they are absurd. The T-Rex fight, for instance, opens with the boss using a smaller dinosaur as an improvised club before tossing it aside and producing a car-sized slab of sheet metal with a handle welded on. You laugh, then you die, then you start again, and that's exactly the genre's appeal. Between desert canyons, huge caverns, verdant meadows and fog-soaked jungles, each zone offers its atmosphere and its guardian, and the urge to see the next boss never fades.
You have to stay lucid, because the concept's charm doesn't erase everything. Dinoblade is the work of a modest studio, and you feel it in the technical polish. The consensus is consistent: the combat lands, the atmosphere works, but the execution has genuine rough edges. You come across stiff animations at times, capricious collisions and a camera that doesn't always love tight spaces, those little flaws that remind you this isn't a big-budget production. Nothing dealbreaking, but enough to snag, at moments, an otherwise very endearing game.
The other limit is scale. A soulslike lives on the richness of its bestiary, the variety of its builds and the depth of its progression, and Dinoblade stays tighter on that ground than the genre's heavyweights. You'd want more options, more systems to dig into once the discovery is over, and that's perhaps where repetition lurks over the long haul. It's a first draft full of ideas and personality, not yet the sprawling monster we'd dream of, and you should approach it for what it is: a slightly raw but sincerely inspired gem.
Dinoblade is the delightful proof that a joke can birth a genuinely good game when taken seriously. Under its meme concept, it hides a nervous, demanding soulslike, built on a Sekiro-style parry system that really works, and boss fights as spectacular as they are hilarious. You find intact that childish pleasure of the dinosaur that hits, doubled with the adult satisfaction of breaking a T-Rex's guard after ten tries. It's raw, it's improvable, but it's full of soul, and it's hard not to give in when the five-year-old inside is already jumping up and down.
You just have to accept its rough edges and measured scale. The technical polish betrays its budget, and the depth stays below the genre's references, but none of that undermines the essential: Dinoblade is a sincere, generous, endearing pleasure, carried by a mad idea owned all the way. For everyone who grew up without ever really letting go of their love of dinosaurs, it's an appointment you don't miss. You come for the joke, and you stay for the game.
A viral meme turned into a real nervous soulslike, where a giant-sworded Spinosaurus parries like Sekiro and fights delirious bosses: rough around the edges, but sincerely inspired and fiercely endearing.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Tested on PC.
Community
Your rating
No comments yet. Be the first.
You might also like
A franchise built on martial arts that finally becomes a fighting game. Avatar Legends bets on its per-character Flow system, and it lands hard.
Five wind-up bunnies cranking their spring to survive a carnival monster. Carnival Hunt reinvents the 5v1 with its noisy key to manage.
An anime open world in Unreal Engine 5, three-way tag-team combat that multiplies combos, and a flood of on-screen effects. DragonSword Awakening is a feast for the eyes.