Retro Rex — Play Free Online

Retro Rex flips the usual platformer script: you are not the hero hopping over monsters, you are the monster. You play a pixel-art dinosaur let loose on a tropical island, and the job is simple and gleefully destructive. Stomp buildings, bite and swallow anyone who runs past, and keep moving before the humans organise a response.

The rampage is split into areas, starting at a local carnival, moving on to a city, then a military base, and finally the inside of an active volcano. Along the way there are trophies to earn and skins to unlock, so there is a reason to replay stages after you have finished them. Sessions are short and chunky, which suits a quick break between longer games.

It sits a little apart from the pure jumpers on Doodle Jump, but the core skill carries over: reading the screen, timing a jump and landing where you meant to. If you like the arcade feel of the headline game and fancy something louder, this is a good change of pace.

How to play

Use the mouse only for the menu buttons. In the game itself everything is on the keyboard:

• Move: Left and Right arrow keys, or A and S
• Jump: W, Up arrow or Spacebar
• Bite: Z
• Eat: X
• Roar: C
• Flame breath power-up: V, once it has been unlocked

Bite is your basic attack on people and objects in your path, and eat is how you finish off what you have caught. The roar is a separate action on its own key. Each level is a side-scrolling run through a themed area, and the aim is to wreck as much of it as you can while you progress to the next.

Tips

• Learn the three action keys, Z, X and C, before you start a harder area, so you are not hunting for them mid-jump.
• Keep an eye out for the flame breath power-up. Once it is unlocked, V gives you a ranged way to clear things you cannot easily reach.
• Go back to earlier areas for the trophies and skins you missed; the opening levels are the easiest place to pick them up.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

If you want another action platformer, try Ovo 2 or OvO game, which are precision runners built around tight jumps and wall slides rather than destruction. Fireboy and Watergirl is a puzzle-platformer made for two players. Bird Jumper stays closer to the vertical hopping of the headline game.

Retro Rex runs in your browser with nothing to install, on desktop or phone, so it is easy to drop into for a few minutes.