Happy Dinos

This is a freemium game review, in which we give our impressions immediately after booting a game up, again after three days, and finally after seven days. That's what the strange sub-headings are all about. Click on the links to jump straight to day three or day seven.

After puppies and kittens, surely the most popular type of animal in games must be the dinosaur. No human being ever saw one in the flesh, but we spend much of our free time playing with little virtual versions of them.

Happy Dinos allows you to do exactly that. It's a freemium-builder crossed with a pet sim, tasking you with looking after and collecting colourful dinos.

I'm going to spend the next week playing the game, reporting back at regular intervals to let you know what I think of its own particular brand of dinosaur rearing. Is it egg-cellent? Or will it all come crashing down like an asteroid? And just how many dinosaur-related puns can a writer cram into a single review?

Let's find out.

It hasn't taken long for Happy Dinos to creep me out.

One of the most prominent demands on my time seems to be breeding new dinos. Instead of handling the issue of copulation discreetly, the game rubs it in your face by making the dinosaurs that you choose to breed have a big wet kiss right in front of you.

Copulation thus achieved, an egg appears in the nest that the two love birds were forced into, and it hatches after a designated period of time - unless you fancy coughing up Gems.

You have to keep your creatures happy, and if you tame them you can also teach them cute little tricks. I'm not sure why you'd want to teach them tricks, but taming each creature is definitely useful, as it allows you to go on and breed that type of dinosaur, which widens your gene pool to create new dino types. Or you can simply purchase new creatures in the shop.

I've not been particularly thrilled by Happy Dinos so far, but there's still plenty of time for the game to get better.

I've come to the conclusion that the taming mini-games are pretty fun. Each is very simple, but they're all implemented well and have decent controls.

Dino Hurdle is a timing-based affair whereby your character automatically runs forward and you have to tap the screen to make him jump over obstacles, collecting fruit along the way. Twin Finder is an equally straightforward affair: a dino is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and you have to find an identical one in the line-up shown above it.

Flying Dinos is a poor man's Fruit Ninja in which you tap dinosaur icons as they're thrown into the air while avoiding other objects. Rocket Ride, meanwhile, sees you dodging left and right to collect fruit and narrowly miss bits of scenery.

You have to play these mini-games each time you want to tame a dinosaur or teach it a new trick, so it's a good thing they're well-made.

What's not so impressive is the presentation. The 3D engine occasionally drops frames, even though the character models aren't very sophisticated, and everything looks decidedly low-resolution in the texture department. Music and sound effects are twee, but at least they're inoffensive.

I'm still building up my animal reserves, and I'm yet to see a truly fresh idea, but I have spotted a dino in a top hat, which was pretty cool.

That dino in a top hat I mentioned? Turns out he literally jumps for joy when you select two other dinosaurs to breed. That's pretty creepy.

After seven days, I'm totally bored with Happy Dinos. The gameplay hasn't changed, and the appeal of collecting dozens of very similar-looking reptiles isn't particularly great.

None of your scaly mates does anything particularly exciting while on-screen, and the game quickly devolves into a love nest for previously extinct reptiles to do their thing and fill out your collection.

I keep feeding them food, expanding their environments, adding decorations to keep everyone happy, and attempting to complete missions such as, "have 15 different dinosaurs" and "have 50 different dinosaurs".

Once you've filled the islands with dinos, the landscape becomes too crowded to have more, forcing you to free them into the wild or give them away to a friend. So to complete your collection, you have to give away whole swathes of your collection. Right.

There's the typical freemium gubbins you've seen for the last few years thrown into the mix, too, with lots of the good stuff hidden behind additional costs.

One element I did quite like, though, was the lucky wheel, which you get a free spin of every day. Returning to give it a flick and see what prize I was awarded was a fun diversion in an otherwise tired freemium builder and life sim.

You might be tempted to download this one simply because of the colourful visuals, but don't be fooled: there's little joy to be found here.