The Cursed Dinosaur Isle

I spawned on the island as a blue Deinonychus standing at the edge of a lake, with a global chat beside me full of players typing in half a dozen languages. A 21-step tutorial walked me through the controls, and it was a pleasant first ten minutes. The pause came when I went back to the selection screen, where the Tyrannosaurus I really wanted cost 800 gems and my account held exactly 5.

You start small and eat, drink and sleep your way up

The controls are simple. A joystick on the left moves your dinosaur, a big red claw button attacks, and dragging anywhere else on the screen turns the camera. A split bar at the bottom tracks health and stamina, with a stomach icon for hunger on one side and a water drop for thirst on the other.

Survival is the whole loop. Predators eat meat from other dinosaurs, plant eaters look for special ferns spread across the map, and any body of water works for a drink. If you can't find food, a scent button helps you track down meat, fish or ferns, and you can use it once every 60 seconds.

Growing up is the goal, and growth changes your size, damage, speed, stamina, health and the chance of causing bleeding or fractures. My raptor went from 14% to 46% grown in my first five or six minutes on the island, and the bar slowed down a lot after that.

Sleep matters more than I expected. Lying down is how you heal, stamina also comes back 20% faster while you're asleep, and two small buff icons appeared over my health bar as soon as my raptor curled up by the water.

Thirty-four species, and only three without a price tag

The selection screen is a carousel of 34 species, each marked with a steak or a leaf so you know at a glance whether it hunts or grazes. Three of them show no price at all, Deinonychus, Coelophysis and Ornithomimus. Everything else costs gold or gems, from 5,000 gold for a Psittacosaurus up to 150,000 for a Spinosaurus or a Therizinosaurus.

The big names sit behind gems. A Tyrannosaurus costs 800, an Allosaurus 650 and a Megaraptor 600, and the stat bars explain the appeal. My free Deinonychus had 850 health and 120 damage, while the Tyrannosaurus card showed 4,560 health and 340 damage.

Each species also has its own abilities. Deinonychus gets War Cry, a roar that lowers stamina use for you and your pack for a while, and Sharp Blades, a claw attack that can stun. Two passives raise its damage when it's badly hurt and its defense when packmates are close.

There's room for cosmetics, too. You pick one of six eye colors and a body color, but only the first color and the first skin were open on my raptor, and the rest showed padlocks.

Servers of 80 players, and rules about who you can bite

Every match happens on a shared server. The list I saw had Standard servers capped at 80 players, with 40 to 61 already inside, and a Dinos counter above my minimap moved between roughly 50 and 75. Day turns to night on its own, and the forest got very dark when the moon came up.

Before you join, the game makes you accept a list of rules. Insults, spam and politics are out, but so are alliances between different species, killing without a reason and spawn killing, along with exploiting bugs, mods and cheats. Breaking them can get an account blocked, and the tutorial repeats that warning at the end.

The social side runs deeper than chat. You can add friends, form a flock with your own species, and once your dinosaur is fully grown and your account reaches level 5, you can build a nest, raise eggs and invite players in as family.

On my third launch the game also stopped me with a registration panel. Guests have to pick a nickname and password using only English letters and numbers, and after that it asked for the nickname of whoever invited me, which I skipped.

Leaving takes a nap and a countdown

You can't just quit when you're done. When I tapped Main Menu, the game told me to put my dinosaur to sleep first, then showed a countdown that starts over if you take damage. Dying, or closing the app before it ends, wipes all of your growth progress.

The tutorial explains why. If you close the app instead of leaving through the menu, your dinosaur stays on the server for another minute, and anyone who finds it can kill it. It's a fair rule in a game about hunting, but it does make every exit a small ritual.

The countdown wasn't the end of it either. Each time I made it back to the main menu, a full-screen ad played first, and once it was two ads back to back. One of them was a static banner with no close button that I could find, and I ended up restarting the game to get rid of it.

Where the gems run out

I started with 1,500 gold and 5 gems, and both come in slowly. Daily quests refresh at 09:00 and pay things like 1,000 gold and 3 gems for surviving ten minutes as a Coelophysis, or 1,500 gold and 5 gems for raising one to full size.

The shop has two free piles, 175 gold or 2 gems, each paid out after a video, with a counter that read x10. At 2 gems per video, the Tyrannosaurus works out to 400 ads, which tells you how hard the game leans on the paid route.

That route is easy to find. The shop lists gold packs of 20,000 to 100,000 and gem packs of 150 to 600, and Google Play lists in-app purchases from $1.99 to $10.99 per item. A Starter Kit with a Guanlong, 50 gems, 10,000 gold and a golden nickname popped up with a countdown, and one daily quest pays 50 gems simply for making any purchase.

What the Block ads switch did for me

The VipMod version has a single switch for this game, Block ads, and it needs VIP1. You flip it in the MOD menu behind the red VIP button on the left edge of the screen. It's meant to stop the full-screen ad that follows your dinosaur's death and the one on the Return to base button, while leaving the shop's reward videos alone.

I turned it on, and later restarted the game with it still on. My raptor never died, so I didn't get to see the death screen with the switch on. Leaving through the menu, though, still ended with a full-screen ad both times I tried it, so it doesn't catch every ad the game shows.

A few things to know up front:

• The switch is built to leave the shop's free gold and gem videos alone, because blocking them would also block the rewards.
• The rules you accept before every match list mods and cheats among the things that get accounts blocked, so play on an account you can afford to lose.
• Don't close the app to skip the exit ad. Your dinosaur stays on the server for a minute, and if it dies there, its growth resets.

How it played on my screen

The island is the best part. The lakes, cliffs and pine forests look good, the day and night cycle changes how the map feels, and the busy servers mean there's almost always someone in chat. Picking a carnivore or a plant eater also changes what you hunt for, so each species plays a little differently.

The weaker parts are the waiting and the selling. Growth slows down quickly, the strongest species cost hundreds of videos' worth of gems, and the exit routine plus the ads after it make short sessions feel heavier than they should. The registration panel on a later launch was another small interruption.

The game holds 4.3 stars from about 215,000 reviews on Google Play, with more than a million downloads and a Teen rating.

So who should download it

If you like survival games where you start as something small and slowly become a threat, this one delivers that feeling well, especially with other players around. It's best for longer sessions, since growing a dinosaur and getting it safely off the server both take time.

If you already play it and the ads after each match wear you down, the switch is worth a try, as long as you go in knowing what I saw. It's aimed at the death and Return to base ads, and it didn't stop the one after leaving through the menu in my sessions.