With amazing graphics that will both excite and sooth parent and player alike, your and your children’s eyes will be glued to the monitor. But it also hosts vivid, cartoon style colors and megalocephalic (oversized head) figures that interact with the environment. The interface is quickly learned; everything is point-and-click with self-explanatory rollover icons.

Dino Island is the perfect game for introducing young, entrepreneurial mad scientists to the zany world of genetically modified dinos and theme park management. In gamers terms, it’s a Real Time Strategy game that starts with ideas inspired by the Jurrasic Park movies and takes them two steps further; one, you not only get to clone dinos but you also get to crossbreed any two dinos that you want, opening up almost limitless possibilities, and two, you get to design and create a theme park around your dino enclosures and then pit your dinos against each other in shows. The shows are where you display your dinos abilities. Use fast dinos like hypsilophodon or pelecanimimus in race events and big smashing bruisers like tyrannosaurus rex or giganotosaurus in the obstacle course events—the more outrageous your shows, the more people will be attracted to you park.

As you would expect from a RTS, the campaigns game starts with a tutorial to familiarize new players with the GUI, the graphical user interface—where you click to build roads, enclosures, farms, restaurants, etc. It teaches the basic infrastructure necessities for operating this hi tech dino facility: how to make enclosures for your dinos and how care for and clone your dinos. The tutorial teaches you the importance of managing time so that your dinos’ feeding dishes are all filled at different times of the day—appointment setting. It also briefly describes the importance of customer relations—how to keep the customers coming to the park. And by the end of the tutorial you’ll even be crossbreeding dinos.

After that, you learn what the scientists want from a theme park…by building one exclusively for them—this part is a gas. If you do it right, there are all these scientists walking through the park jumping up with their arms in the air, they are having so much fun. The fully 3D camera angles with zoom make the game fun to watch up close—especially when you’re just waiting around saving up enough money for a t-rex or brachiosaurus.

Proceeding through a series of other goal/reward based scenarios; you will unlock more expensive, more exciting dinos and buildings. Starting with small-time food stands like Big Bite Burgers or Caravan of Joy you will work your way up to sit-down restaurants like Sweet Sin or the multi-tiered tree fort Flavored Feasts. Each food stand, restaurant, park, gift shop, and attraction (Haunted House, Big Wheel, Dino Dodgems bumper cars) is more attractive to different segments of the population. Pleasing customers from demographics as divers as pensioners, surfers, parents and hooligans isn’t easy. The Artificial Intelligence is quite reliable and often customer service will be the last thing on your mind—crossbreeding dinos being much more intriguing.

After you—ah I mean your children—have mastered all seven of the campaigns, you—they will still be able to enjoy the game in free mode where anything is instantly available, as long as you have enough money. Ten different locales are available to begin your free mode adventure, from tropical volcanic islands to an arctic archipelago.

I had a few problems getting through the very first part of the tutorial. You should have heard me complaining to my roommates about not being able to figure out a kid’s game. The problem was that I had the game speed cranked up from the get-go. Start out playing it slow and closely reading the instructions and everything after that should be cake.

That said this is an awesome game. The colors are vivid and multi-textured. The dinos are brilliantly animated and fun to watch while you’re waiting for some income. The interface is easily and quickly mastered and the options are just enough to make this an evergreen game for kids without becoming too complex. It is an excellent introduction to the Real Time Strategy genre without coming off as condescending. I think that any young people that are into dinos would enjoy this game, because after the initial hardships, I enjoyed it. Thus, buy Dino Island, please children, save marriage.