Back in 2003 we saw the release of Jurassic Park : Operation Genesis; a parking building simulator where you would inevitably let loose a T-Rex on your parkgoers. It accomplished what it wanted to do, allowing you to make your own Jurassic Park, and now fifteen years later Frontier Developments of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Planet Coaster fame have graced us with a game that once again accomplishes what it set out to do and nothing more.
Jurassic World Evolution
Developer: Frontier Developments
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
As you can expect of any sort of theme park simulator, Jurassic World Evolution allows you to basically build your dream dinosaur park. Let’s get this out of the way now, the dinosaurs look amazing. There was such a clear dedication to realizing these creatures from the way they move to the way they sound. Seeing an Ankylosaurus slowly lumber into your exhibit is a pure treat and of course that T-Rex roar just never gets old. Like in the original game, you’re able to hop into a helicopter or jeep and move around the park fixing buildings or taking photos. Getting in the Jeep and driving up to a Brachiosaurus is just such a breathtaking experience and seeing a Triceratops charge at you is a nerve-wracking moment. Unfortunately, that’s where all the creative work seems to have gonet in to. While the dinosaurs look brilliant, the overall aesthetic of the game is, as expected, based on the Jurassic World films which has that clean, Mass Effect sci-fi look that is beyond played out. There’s a very distinct lack of personality from the buildings and ignoring the dinosaurs, your park will just end up looking like a bunch of white buildings since nothing stands out.
As with any theme park simulator, you’ll have to manage a variety of elements to keep profits up and your park running. Visitors need to have a full view of the dinosaurs, eat, shop, have fun and generally be placated. The dinosaurs also need to be maintained by refilling their feeding stations, making sure they’re in their appropriate element (raptors like a lot of forest to hide in), don’t die of sickness, and are paired with compatible dinosaurs. Deciding which dinosaurs to put together in an exhibit can be fun, especially when they begin to interact with each other, but each dinosaur has a limit to how many total dinosaurs they’ll tolerate in their vicinity and the total amount of a similar species. The problem with this system is that the game doesn’t surface these stats when you’re incubating the dinosaur so if you create one that isn’t as social as the others you’ve got to quickly race to tranquilize it before it starts losing its mind.
Along with managing your park, you’ll also have three divisions that will offer you missions; completing them will supply you with cash and unlock new buildings or upgrades for your park. You’ve got the Science, Entertainment, and Security division and each one gets a nice constant chiding by Jeff Goldblum who reprises his role from the film series as Ian Malcolm. You’ll be able to request random contracts from each division that can sometimes feature requirements you won’t be able to accomplish due to not having the required dinosaur or building. This can be especially annoying considering there’s a cooldown to requesting new contracts. The division system is fine since it gives you a near constant stream of goals to focus on, but it’s nonsensically designed. Each contract will increase your rep with that division while lowering it for the other two which puts you in this frustrating balancing act of appeasing everyone. This makes particularly less sense when you’re given a contract by the entertainment division to take a picture of a specific dinosaur, which will lower your rep with the other two divisions, but then you’re given the exact same contract from another division which will then lower your rep with the previous division who had just asked you to do the same. Let a division go ignored for too long and they might sabotage a part of your park causing a massive headache for yourself. It’s not hard to make sure each division is satisfied enough, but it just makes you question why this was made this way to begin with and is an annoying element to have to stay on top of. It comes off more as a mechanic the developers ham-fistedly threw in there to complicate things for the sake of it.
When you play a theme park or city simulator the basic premise is you’re given a big space to organically grow your city or park from; the challenge comes from managing various elements as the size of your park gets bigger. Jurassic World Evolution instead does the opposite. There are five locations, each based on the island chain from the films called The Five Deaths. You’ll start the game on Isla Matanceros and once you hit a certain goal you’ll gain access to the next one. Each of these islands increases in difficulty and have a gimmick to shake things up; Isla Muerta for example has storms hit more often so a focus on protecting power stations is a must while Isla Tacano starts you with no cash. The map space on each island is also incredibly small for the genre and feature lots of narrow paths or mountains in the middle of your park that force you to build in the way the developers want you to as opposed to making it your own. When I felt good with my five-star ranked map I asked a friend to shoot a picture of his to compare and we had practically made the exact same park; I noticed other players online had also done the same thing with buildings and dinosaur exhibits more or less placed almost exactly to where I put mine.
To any other game in the genre, these would be the “challenge mode” maps of the game. Where you take the knowledge you acquired to create the best park in these limited play spaces. Instead, Frontier Developments decided to make it the main game. Within the first hour or two of the game you’ll quickly unlock a sixth island: the infamous Isla Nublar from the films. This island is separate from the others in that you have a more circular and open space to play in, and that everything is free since you’re given unlimited cash to basically build whatever you want. It’s a pure sandbox mode that is confusingly just given away immediately and you’re probably wondering why I’d complain about getting what’d be the most fun mode in the genre almost immediately: it’s because you won’t have anything to fill it with.
When you unlock the island you’ll have maybe four dinosaurs and a small handful of buildings which means you won’t want to touch the mode until you’ve unlocked a more sizeable amount of items to fill the park with. It would have made sense to have given the park out after you’ve at least progressed past the third island so that you could take the things you’ve unlocked and be able to make something decent over there. The other issue with this island is that while you’re given a wider space to play around in, it’s still quite small. And I haven’t even mentioned how you still have to wait for items to build. With no money to earn since everything is free, but still having to wait minutes for dinosaurs to hatch or buildings to construct you’re left with a feeling like the developers couldn’t decide how they wanted this island to play. Limitless sandbox or more traditional simulator? It feels like both slapped together in a way that feels pretty pointless. You don’t really get any sense of purpose to playing in that island, and since the park buildings themselves lack any sort of personality you won’t even want to spend the time building your “perfect” park since it all just looks bland in the end. You’ll most likely just build a bunch of exhibits to see the new dinosaurs you unlocked if you’re too impatient to just do it in the regular islands.
The game also features a pretty serious pacing problem. You’ll quickly learn when you move to each new island that the go-to strategy is to make a fossil center, go back to a previous island (where you’re already rich since money doesn’t transfer) to pay for an expedition, then return to your new island to sell the fossils. You’ll go in this rinse-repeat cycle until the new island is stable enough to pay for things on its own and by the time you get there you’re likely moving onto the next island you’ve unlocked. There’s no real incentive to stay on an island once you’ve unlocked the next one either which leaves you with a bunch of half-finished parks. New parks unlock when you hit a 3-star rating on your current location and you’ll easily unlock everything from each division by the time you hit that rank. The game doesn’t offer a good enough reason, let alone a reason at all, to stay put. Each new island also feels like you’re just sitting around waiting for your profits per minute to get to a high enough number where the money will go from trickling in to an absolute flood. I spent a decent portion of the game either watching YouTube videos on my phone or chatting with a friend who was playing the same waiting game.
The Final Word
Jurassic World Evolution is a serviceable game in the genre and the dinosaurs look absolutely stunning, but some highly questionable design decisions really hold back what could have been the next greatest park simulator.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
