After leaving the visitor center, multiple helicopters fly off with the dinosaurs the character had tranquilized. The six levels of "Dino Defender" consist of fast-paced quick thinking challenges. The player must move around obstacles and find supply boxes, switch on circuit breakers and avoid dinosaurs. Helicopters drop supply boxes onto the island, which contain gear such as a net, a tranquilizer or a distractor flare which can be used to capture or distract dinosaurs. "Call boxes" can be used to lure dinosaurs and various other weapons to tranquilize them. "Circuit Breakers" scattered around the island can be switched on to activate the island's electricity. To collect gear to capture/tranquilize a certain dinosaur, the player must find a 'supply box' which contains a certain number of both 'call boxes', which are small speakers that play a dinosaur call, causing dinosaurs of that species to investigate. At some points in the game, the player will have to swim underwater. When a player is underwater, an "air" gauge appears, which slowly decreases. The player will die if the gauge runs out of air. Upon completion of the game, the player is rewarded with printable trading cards showing the dinosaurs the player has captured. Trading cards for each dinosaur are only rewarded after all the dinosaurs belonging to a particular species have been captured. Gerbino of GameZone gave the game an 8 and praised its graphics, but criticized the difficulty of the game's later stages and also noted "choppy playback during dialogue sections." Jinny Gudmundsen of "USA Today" gave the game a rating of four out of five and recommended it for children age nine and older because of its challenging gameplay. Gudmundsen wrote, "Dino Defender works well because it requires an agile mind in addition to good hand-eye coordination." Jason MacIsaac of "The Electric Playground" gave the game a 70 percent score. He enjoyed the game's non-violent interactive levels and also praised the many different moves that can be performed by the game's character. However, he considered certain parts of the game to be too difficult, and also complained of, "Noticeable lag in transitions between screens." MacIsaac concluded that the game was, "A modest but doable platform game." In 2018, Zack Zwiezen of "Kotaku" called the game "terrible" and among the "weirdest" "Jurassic Park" games ever released, writing, "The main character looks unlike anything seen in a "Jurassic Park" film, and when The Defender is just walking around a level without dinos on-screen it is easy to forget this is an official "Jurassic Park III" video game."