Dino Coloring Game

Review by eFreeware

Coloring books have a way of disappearing into the bottom of a toy box, and the good dinosaur ones are often the first to go. A digital alternative keeps the whole set in one place, and that is roughly the idea behind Dino Coloring Game, a free app from the developer Coloring Games.

The premise is straightforward. You get a large collection of dinosaur line drawings to fill in with color, and the app handles the rest: saving your work, sharing it, and even printing it. It has been on Google Play since June 2013 and has passed 10 million installs, which says something about how long a simple idea can keep an audience.

I went through what the developer describes to work out where this fits. It is an education app rather than a game, and it is built around creativity rather than challenge, so it works as a quiet activity rather than something with levels or scores.

A coloring book for dinosaur fans of any age

The developer presents this as suitable for both adults and children, and the subject matter supports that. Dinosaurs appeal across a wide age range, and coloring is one of those activities that does not demand much from the person doing it. A parent looking for something to occupy a child on a rainy afternoon and an adult who simply likes dinosaurs are both plausible users here.

The content leans family-friendly. Alongside the obvious fierce predators, the developer lists friendly herbivores, mother dinosaurs with their young, fossils, dinosaurs hatching from eggs, and bird-like dinosaurs. That mix matters if you are choosing this for a younger child, because not every page is a set of teeth.

I would expect the app to work best as a shared activity. The ability to save a page and come back to it later suits a child who colors in short bursts, and the sharing option gives a finished picture somewhere to go once it is done.

More than 200 pages, from T. rex to hatchlings

The headline number is the catalog: more than 200 coloring pages, all dinosaur-themed. The developer breaks that down into recognizable groups, including tyrannosaurus rex and other raptors, plant-eating dinosaurs, family scenes with a mother and her offspring, fossils, hatchlings, and bird dinosaurs. For anyone who has burned through a paper coloring book in a week, that volume is the main argument.

Each page is colored by hand with a palette that offers many different colors. There is also a free-drawing option, so you are not limited to filling in the lines that are already there. That combination covers two fairly different moods: following a picture that is already drawn, or starting from nothing.

Pages can be saved and loaded again, which turns the app into something closer to a sketchbook than a one-sitting distraction. Finished work can be shared with family or friends, and the developer also includes a printing option, so a digital page can become a physical one.

Saving, sharing and printing your finished pages

The save-and-load feature is the part I find most useful in principle. Coloring a detailed page can take a while, and being able to stop and pick it up later removes the pressure to finish in one go. It also means a child can build up a small collection of half-finished dinosaurs without losing any of them.

Sharing is built in. That feels appropriate for an app with an Everyone content rating. Printing is the other outlet, and it is a neat way to close the loop: color a dinosaur on a screen, print it, and it can go on a wall or into a folder.

The free-drawing mode is worth noting separately, because it changes what the app is. With a blank canvas and a color palette, it becomes a general drawing tool with a dinosaur theme rather than a fixed set of pages. The app is built to stimulate creativity, and that rests mostly on this combination of ready-made pages and open drawing.

What it costs and what comes with it

Dino Coloring Game is free to download. It contains ads and it offers in-app purchases. The developer does not go into detail about what the purchases cover, so I will not speculate about whether they remove advertising or add anything else.

The app has been updated recently, with the developer describing general work to keep things running smoothly rather than any new feature. For a title that first appeared in 2013, that is a reasonable sign that the basic experience is still being looked after.

With a 4.3 average across more than 50,000 ratings, the reception has been broadly positive over a long period. That is a large enough sample to be meaningful, though it tells you nothing about how any individual page or tool behaves.

How it compares with other coloring options

The obvious alternative is a physical coloring book and a box of pencils. Paper needs no charging, no ads and no purchases. What it cannot do is hold 200-plus pages in one place, save work in progress, or send a finished picture to a relative in another city.

There is also the broader field of digital coloring apps, many of which cover animals, vehicles, mandalas or general subjects. This one is narrower by design: it is built around dinosaurs and nothing else. If the appeal of a coloring app is variety across themes, that focus will feel like a constraint rather than a feature.

A general drawing app is the third comparison point. Those tend to offer more tools and fewer ready-made pictures. Dino Coloring Game sits somewhere between the two, with a large set of dinosaur pages plus a free-drawing mode, which is a sensible middle ground for anyone who wants both.

A dependable pick for dinosaur-loving colorists

I would recommend Dino Coloring Game to anyone who wants a large, themed coloring collection on a phone or tablet. The combination of more than 200 dinosaur pages, saving, sharing, printing and a free-drawing mode covers a lot of ground for a free download, and the long track record on Google Play suggests the format holds up.

It fits households with dinosaur-obsessed children particularly well, and the range of designs, from friendly herbivores to fossils and hatchlings, gives younger colorists plenty to choose from. Adults who enjoy coloring as a low-key pastime will find the same catalog works for them.

The things to weigh are the ads and the in-app purchases, which come with the free price, and the narrow theme. This is a dinosaur coloring app and it does not pretend to be anything else. If dinosaurs are what you want, the depth of the collection is the reason to install it.

What's new in version 18.6.0

Thank you for playing our game! We're always working to improve your experience, and with this latest release, we've made some general updates to ensure that everything runs smoothly. As always, we appreciate your support and feedback. Update now and keep the fun going!