If you are interested in this incredibly niche genre, you already know about Jurassic World Evolution 3. You’re either bemoaning the continued use of Jurassic Park/World dinosaur designs or praising some of the more accurate designs like the beautiful new Deinonychus. You’ve likely got opinions on the park rides, its connections to the Jurassic Park lore, and have planned out your following 15 parks in the lead up to playing the game. That said, how is the game? It’s pretty great.
Jurassic World Evolution 3
Developer: Frontier Games
Price: $60
Platform: PS5, Xbox, PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
I’ve been playing dinosaur park builders since the early 2000s. Spending countless hours with Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs, Jurassic Park 3: Park Builder, and the beloved Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. So back in 2018, when Frontier released the original Jurassic World Evolution, I was pretty psyched. Finally, a new modern dinosaur park builder! It came out, and it was fine, not terrible, but not particularly great. Then, a few years later, Frontier basically fixed every issue I had with it in Jurassic World Evolution 2. It had marine and flying reptiles, and over 80 dinosaurs by the end of its lengthy post-launch support. There wasn’t much left to ask for, so when Jurassic World Evolution 3 was announced, you had to ask what else they could possibly add. I wasn’t quite prepared for the answer.
If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise, a quick rundown is that you’re trying to make Jurassic Park/World work. You’re creating a dinosaur theme park that functions both as a money making venture and as a place where dinosaurs and guests feel comfortable. You’re juggling stuff like gift shops, rides, and guest safety while also cloning dinosaurs and making sure their enclosures are to their liking. You’re also digging up fossils to get DNA for new dinosaurs, hiring staff to clone them and conduct research, and making sure they’re happy so they don’t go Dennis Nedry on your park. You also have to deal with the occasional hurricane too.
Like most sim games, it’s a lot of plate spinning. It feels great turning a park into a well oiled machine. There’s a great sense of escalation starting with small herbivores and carnivores and slowly working your way up to the massive series mainstays like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brachiosaurus, and watching as your shops and rides grow in scale with them. Really, though, the true joy is watching as your dinosaurs stomp their way out of their hatchery as the music swells and they wander into the exhibit you’ve made for them.
Despite the fun of the sim management, we’re here for the dinosaurs, and making dinosaur enclosures is the true joy of the game. Using landscape brushes, you adjust the exhibit to the dinosaur’s wants and needs, such as the types of trees they like, deep or shallow water, sand, rocks, and swampy areas. This can be done in the style of the overall map’s biome, like cactuses and joshua trees in the maps set in the American Southwest, or you can pick trees and ground types from any of the game’s biomes and create enclosed ecosystems. Each dinosaur has a happiness meter that reflects how it feels about its enclosure, and you technically don’t have to go over 80%, but there’s a real joy in tweaking the environment until you hit that 100%.
So, you might be wondering, if that’s all in the game already, what’s new? Well, the most advertised example is breeding and baby dinosaurs. In the previous two games, all the dinosaurs were female, so there wasn’t much in the way of hanky panky, so life couldn’t really find a way. You’d simply dig up fossils, synthesize DNA in a lab, then release the full grown dinosaurs into their exhibits. This is still mostly the case, but now you can create men!
This is a crazy sentence, but male dinosaurs change everything. For starters, they look different, like birds in real life; the male dinosaurs are usually more colorful and flamboyant looking. They also change the dynamics of your enclosures; herding dinosaurs will usually need a male to meet happiness requirements, and sometimes require specific numbers of males for population sizes. It’s genuinely impressive that something that seems so simple adds so much complexity to the game. It adds a lot to the feeling of reality in the dinosaurs.
Obviously, the biggest sell of the game is baby dinosaurs. 75 of the 80 species in the game can have babies, each with a unique juvenile model and behaviors. That’s every non-hybrid animal in the game, and they’re adorable. It’s incredibly heartwarming to watch a T. rex take a moment to nuzzle its child’s snout. They also add a challenge, sure, they start small, but they do grow up, and an enclosure for two T.rexes and a baby might not be big enough for three full grown ones. Or maybe a father might not actually want to raise a child, and might see them as a quick and easy meal. Each baby has its own challenges, and it’s fun to find them out as life finds a way.
Frontier has also added a feature they are famous for from their other Sims games, a robust prop creation system. Using thousands of various pieces, you can make buildings, caves, skeletons, and, honestly, anything you could imagine. You can build your park out anyway you want, and the only limit is your imagination, and frankly, your patience. While the creation system is robust, it’s not very intuitive, and there’s no tutorial for it, so you have to figure it out on your own. Thankfully, there’s also an online workshop where you can download other people’s creations. So if you’re feeling lazy and you want to put your park on a Halo Ring, or build your own personal Skull Island, other people have you covered.
If you’re not feeling creative, there are prebuilt pieces based on the franchise’s history and various countries around the globe, with objects and locales based on the American Southwest, Japan, Hawaii, and Europe. Each has biomes that reflect those locales. There’s also an island generation system, where you can build and randomize plots of land in any of those biomes.
Jurassic World Evolution 3 Sets a New Bar for the Series
Jurassic World Evolution 3 has a lot to offer; it’s truly impressive, especially compared to how limited the first game was when it came out. A few features from Frontier’s other zoo sim, Planet Zoo, would be welcome. I’d love to see a temperature system come into play, especially now that we’re getting cold climate dinosaurs like Yuytyrannus. Enrichment items would also be welcome, allowing for more interactability with the dinosaurs. These aren’t holding the game back in any way, but they’re systems that work and would add a bit more variety to the types of enclosures that you can build.
There’s also a reliance on features that just aren’t interesting, especially in the campaign. Stuff like dinosaur wrangling or forcing you to take control of an ATV and use its awkward controls to fix broken parks. These are annoying at best, and frustrating at worst. Especially if you’re playing on a mouse and keyboard. There’s never a moment when you’d want to be taken out of the management view, but the campaign seems to think otherwise. These moments are fleeting, though, a blip in the grand scheme of things.
So, I’m not going to beat around the bush here: Jurassic World Evolution 3 might be the best dinosaur park builder ever made. Lofty statement, I know. It’s incredibly feature rich, and immensely satisfying. With a deep stable of dinosaurs and aquatic/flying reptiles, with much more to come. Frontier has made something truly special here. If you’re a fan of park builders, especially dinosaur park builders, I cannot recommend it enough.
The Final Word
Frontier has managed to make the ultimate dinosaur park builder. Whether you’re here for in-depth park management or making your dream dinosaur enclosure, you really can’t do much better.
MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
