Neal said I had to check out this game, so today I did. In Fossil Fighters, you search for and clean fossils, which you then resurrect and battle with. These battles are three-on-three, and each "vivosaur" has an elemental property. It's Dinosaur King.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, as I got some enjoyment out of that game. However, a key differences is that Fossil Fighters doesn't use real dinosaurs. It uses made-up cartoony beasts in the shape of dinosaurs: "vivosaurs." But aside from the removal of Dinosaur King's annoying ro-sham-bo fighting system, Fossil Fighters is basically the same game.

Fossil excavation is done with a hammer, drill, X-ray machine, and the mic for blowing away dust. The process is more tedious than Dinosaur King (or Spectrobes) in that the drill is barely effective, but the hammer easily damages the fossil within the rock. The demo allowed me to clean two fossils: one looked like the skull of Sinraptor (in left lateral view) and the other resembled a Triceratops skull draw by somebody who had never seen a Triceratops skull before. If you damage the skull too much within the time limit, your excavation fails, but the game is pretty easy on you.

Battles are more Pokemon than anything else, but all three of your vivosaurs share a giant PP pot which regenerates at the beginning of every turn. Each vivosaur has three or four attacks to choose from, and they all have elemental properties. Some have side effects. Because the game's elemental advantage/disadvantage system is not explained in the demo, the fight lasted a really long time.

The game looks great, though, despite the fact that most of the theropods look like stuffed animals (awwww! instead of ahhhh!). I saw a pterosaur, ankylosaur, chasmosaurine, dromaeosaur, and various generalized theropods during the fight. They were all modeled well and had nice smooth animations.

While the lack of real dinosaurs is disappointing, Fossil Fighters does look like my kind of game, and I'll be curious to try out the full game.