Thanks for the free game! I've been going through bags of Doritos like they are going out of style lately. It's funny too, because I hate cheddar and I hate corn, but I love Doritos.
-Sadness courtesy of the Major Nelson comments section
I know, I know: technically, to play this game between its release and now, I would have had to play it in the daytime. And yes, this was a mistake.
But it wasn’t a mistake on the same level as, say, the heated Yaris achievement contest I got into last year that resulted in way too much playing of Yaris. This is because Doritos Dash of Destruction knows several things about itself.
It knows you don’t actually want to play it, for example, so it keeps things short. It knows that you are only playing it for the GamerScore (it actually acknowledges this in multiple text boxes in the game), so it keeps the achievements flowing constantly. It also knows that it is just a stupid game about being a dinosaur that wants to eat Doritos trucks, or being a Doritos truck that wants to make its deliveries but doesn't want to get eaten by a dinosaur. So it keeps things stupid. Really stupid. Embarrassingly stupid.
And it’s not terrible, not in the same way that the abstract abomination that was Yaris was terrible. The top-down driving is competent, but that’s a subgenre that had its heyday in the NES era so of course it’s unexciting. Being a T-Rex is just as banal as you’d expect being an unstoppable killing machine would be, because it’s not actually all that much fun to be unstoppable.
It’s a game that’s designed the way Doritos are designed—it’s easy to start consuming it, and kind of enjoyable while you’re consuming, but there’s no nutritional value and at the end you feel kind of empty and gross. That’s kind of impressive, that a game about Doritos could mimic that product so capably in its design.
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