Dino Island, from French publisher Monte Cristo, is a humorous and lighthearted cross between Jurassic Park and the venerable Bullfrog classic, Theme Park. It is a game in which you construct your own amusement park, with dinosaurs as the main attraction.

We recently received a beta of the game to try out, although it unfortunately was in French. The interface was easy enough for us to lay down the foundation of a dino-themed park, although the more complex aspects of park creation, like the specialized dino exhibits, were so complicated that they begged for English tool tips. Still, we did manage to build our amusement park and sat back to watch how our moneymaking machine would fare against the army of incoming tourists.

The graphics in Dino Island are comical and colorful, featuring dinosaurs that are all exaggerated. The meat eaters have ferocious expressions, while the triceratops and other plant eaters look very docile and even cuddly, with droopy expressions. The T-rexes also have enormous feet, gargantuan jaws, and tiny hands. The artists really accentuated the physical traits of each dinosaur, making them caricatures of their realistic selves. All the dinosaurs look good, though. The attractions you can build are likewise exaggerated and brightly colored.

Life on Dino Island starts with a deserted tropical island that you have to build into a thriving dino theme park.

You start out the game on a tropical island, completely empty except for a dock. Ships can come to drop off tourists, but until you create a compelling park, they won't come. So you'll start off laying the foundation for your park and erecting all the rides that your wallet can handle. Like in other similar games, you can build however you like, as long as you make sure there are ample food stalls to feed the hungry, toilets for the needy, gift shops for the tourists who want to drop cash, and roads to connect all the attractions to each other. Roads are especially important, because without them, your attractions, shops, and food stalls will go empty. However, we noticed that even with this infrastructure in place, many of our attractions weren't being visited. While we couldn't figure out this problem completely (the build was in French, after all), it does mean that there is more to managing your park than just laying down a roller coaster and a connecting roadway. Perhaps you have to also make sure there are enough lavatories or food joints within radius of each ride before people can visit them. Or maybe you need other supporting infrastructure.

Your building options, aside from the gift shops, food stalls, park pieces (such as trees and fountains), infrastructure, and attractions (including bumper cars, Ferris wheels, and others), are dinosaur pens. You can make them as big or small as you like to accommodate the different dinosaurs you might place in them. Once the pens have been placed, you can also place observation booths around them so that people can watch the dinosaurs within. Ideally, your park will offer a huge variety of options for the tourists. You'll want violent dino fights, cozy exhibits with plant eaters, gift shops, and other goodies to appease the wide variety of tourists, who all have their own desires and needs.

There are roughly two dozen dinosaurs to play with in Dino Island, including the t-rex killer, Gigantosaurus.

According to Monte Cristo, there are two great appeals to Dino Island. One is the park-building gameplay, while the other is the chance to play with dinosaurs. Dino Island will come with more than two-dozen dinos with which to populate your creature pens. There are the famous carnivorous ones, the therapods. Those include the tyrannosaurus rex, allosaurus, deinonychus, velociraptor, gigantosaurus, and troodon. There are also lumbering sauropods, such as brachiosaurus, diplodocus, and saltasaurus. A few ceratopsians (the horned dinosaurs) include triceratops and protoceratops. There are also the ankylosaurus, kentrosaurus, and stegosaurus. Rounding out the dinosaurs are the two-legged herbivores, such as the helmet-headed pachycephalosaurus, iguanodon, parasaurolophus, hypsilophodon, and pelecanimimus. But Dino Island doesn't restrict you to playing with just the dinos that come in the game. There is also a dino-creation lab that lets you brew your own terrible lizards.