Well, I can spend my lunchtime hunting dinosaurs.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I reckon that makes me pretty damn lucky.

A charging dinosaur. One bolt. One shot. And I'm not dead. Phew.

It’s not even like I have to move. And even if I die – which I do – then I don’t really die, I just glare at the screen and hit a button to try again.

When you sit down and think about it, life is pretty sweet.

Come on, just for a few seconds, sit down, think of all the amazing things you can do. You can hunt dinosaurs, explore alien worlds, shoot outlaws in the American West, drive fast cars at insane speeds and even take part in strange activities that don’t have any equivalent in the physical world. Strange glowing blocks and lines, moving, pulsing, changing under your control.

The power of it all! The worlds we visit! The sheer fucking strangeness of the things we experience every single day!

It’s a wonder we’re not all insane.

My trophy room. There's going to be a T-Rex here one day.

It’s very good, you know. Thoroughly enjoyable stuff, even with the sound off. (Though it does lose a lot of atmosphere and makes you rely on the radar a bit more.)

Chose the first map, a random herbivorous dinosaur and the only gun I had access to – a pistol. Got dropped into what I assume is a random starting point (though I think there are a few it cycles between, as I definitely started in the same spot twice). It looks very turn-of-the-millennium-PC-game, so pretty good for an iPhone game.

Taking down one of these beasts with a pistol takes some doing.

Once I’d got comfortable with moving and aiming I shot the first dinosaur I saw, then was confused because I didn’t get any points. Decided you probably need to only shoot dinosaurs that you’ve chosen to hunt to get points, as is indeed the case. (I read the help a little later.)

Anyway, I went in a few times, used the radar to track down dinosaurs and then shot them before they spotted me and ran away. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially with the pistol. (Not because of the controls though – they’re fantastic.)

The map shows you your location and the location of the dinosaurs you're hunting.

Enjoyable stuff, but I then decided to hunt the dangerous, carnivorous allosaurus. Dear me, there’s few things as exciting as making the dinosaur’s call, hearing an answering call off through the trees and then trying to hit the dinosaur before it spots you, leaps and kills you. I died a lot, but it was fantastically atmospheric and exciting. And when I finally dropped an allosaurus with the last bullet in my gun as he ran towards to me, well, that moment was worth three quid, right there.

My only slight concern is that playing it without sound – the way I play iPhone games 99% of the time – might not be an option here. I’ll have to give it a go and see.