Parents' Guide to Jurassic World Alive

This augmented reality (AR) game takes dinosaurs out of the park and into your home via an engaging adventure that's sure to shake up the mobile gaming world. Jurassic World Alive puts a prehistoric spin on the augmented reality formula, bringing itself into the player's world with a few new twists. Collecting dinosaurs feels more like an act of skill than a stroke of luck, with players launching darts from a drone at moving targets to harvest enough DNA for cloning. The drone aspect also gives players more range in terms of what they can interact with -- albeit in exchange for a shorter time limit, represented by the drone's battery charge. This can help keep players from wandering into places they shouldn't be to add some rare creature to their collection.

In the game's Battle mode, players duke it out in 4v4, best-of-three rounds, with turn-based fights. It's interesting to see what the different dinosaurs are capable of, weighing strengths and weaknesses to come up with unique strategies. That said, there are a few minor frustrations. For starters, players choose their top eight dinosaurs for their "team," but the four picked from that group to fight are selected at random. Also, since the matches take place against live online opponents, fights can drag on while you're waiting for other players to make their moves -- or get dropped due to connection issues. It's still a lot of fun, but it's far from perfect. Still, if you're interested in wrangling and raising dinos, Jurassic World Alive gives you a good taste of controlling the beasts without them getting out of control.