Jurassic World Evolution (PC)
The Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films often explore the ethical concerns and material consequences of reviving extinct dinosaurs and trying to turn them into theme park attractions. Playing god in such a way tends to go awry, but in the video game space, you can have all the fun of bringing dinosaurs back to life without any of the potential dangers. Jurassic World Evolution is just one of many games that let you build your own dinosaur amusement park, and while the prehistoric creatures you bring to life will certainly cause you problems with trying to run a profitable business, at least you won’t end up devoured if you do slip up.
Jurassic World Evolution is a park builder, profit your main motivator since the only way to really fail is to run out of cash. To that end, you will be focusing on your main attraction, the ability to clone dinosaurs from ancient DNA and put them in enclosures for the world to see. To even get started on reviving a dinosaur though, you’ll first need to send out digging teams to collect fossils, then spend some time extracting the DNA, and since fossils only contain fractions of the genetic code, it takes a while to get enough for a viable genome, and even then there’s only a chance a clone will be properly formed. You can invest the time in continuing to build up the genome and eventually it can reach 100% completion, but you can also quite easily adjust the genetic code of a creature to try and make it a better attraction. Only an edit to skin coloration shows directly, but you can make your dinosaurs more aggressive, defensive, and longer living, crowds more excited if they can expect a little discordance between creatures sharing the same pen.
Unfortunately, since the dinosaur creation process is the main focus and one that involves so many steps, it can lead to your Jurassic World Evolution experience being peppered with long waiting periods. While the steps to making one along the way are often fairly cheap comparatively, creating dinosaurs can cost millions of dollars, a clone failing to coalesce sometimes a huge money and time setback as a result. Part of what can make this wait a little tedious is the lack of any ability to speed things up, although a fast forward feature was seemingly left out intentionally. After all, with dinosaurs in your park, things can go wrong at any moment, and the game doesn’t want you to miss out when things do go awry. A dinosaur’s comfort level in their enclosure is incredibly important, for if the environment isn’t to their liking, their food and water needs aren’t being met, or there are too many other dinosaurs or not enough of their own species, they can start trying to break free. You can invest in strong fencing and electrical deterrents, but that won’t keep them from causing trouble forever, and a dinosaur running around your park will start attacking guests, potentially even eating them. Lawsuits from a runaway dino can definitely impede your ability to build up cash, and while you can send out teams to tranq the dinosaur and take it back to its pen, your teams can be surprisingly slow and inaccurate even with upgrades. You can pop into the vehicles yourself and do the work, but where this can get a touch annoying is when a chain of escapes occur. I had a herd of stegosauruses constantly breaking free because their social needs weren’t met… primarily because by the time I could get the escapees back, the others had just broken free, meaning even if they would be comfortable together, the needs system meant they’d still be irate since there was no cool down period after putting them back in their enclosures.
Naturally, with dinosaurs being the draw that likely got you to play this game, they should be the main source of conflict and treated with some gravitas. You do have tools on your side to help understand them though, a range of meters showing you each animal’s specific needs, although to understand their species you must first clone one successfully. Coming to understand how to best take care of them is an intriguing part of the process, learning which other dinosaurs they can be safely housed with part of the appeal. You might be wary putting carnivores together with herbivores, but a dilophosaurus isn’t exactly going to pick on a brachiosaurus, so experimentation, despite potentially leading to some fights and deaths, can help you make a park with a good variety without having to build multiple costly and barren enclosures. The dinosaurs themselves all look superb, able to capture the familiar look of the Jurassic franchise with animations that feel perfect for the type of creature they are. The majesty of reviving such ancient beasts never wanes, and with the camera trying to pull you in close for low angle shots of each one you release into your park, you get an excellent perspective for basking in how the game realized each species. They do, unfortunately, have a few repeated and unyielding animations when it comes to fighting other dinosaurs, but sometimes sitting back and watching them live can be appealing on its own.
Besides cultivating dinosaurs, you do have other concerns for building your theme park. Power and space are some of the most consistent limitations, the player needing to lay things out intelligently to make sure they have a good degree of room for enclosures and other profitable ventures on top of the vital facilities for producing energy or doing research and collecting fossils. Research is a bit basic, you just tell people to do it and later get the rewards, but there are guest services to consider beyond just making sure they can get good views of the enclosures. You can start building gift shops, restaurants, hotels, and more to occupy their time, monorails to help them traverse the island better, and since your parks are always built on islands, you’ll even need emergency shelters and storm protection since hurricanes and tornadoes can sometimes put your park at risk. However, because space is at a premium and often the way you interact with a business is just by raising or lowering the staff and prices, these can’t end up filling those wait periods for you to build up money or complete fossil acquisition and dinosaur creation. Luckily, while you do start off pretty tight on cash, once a park reaches a certain size, money will flow with enough frequency that down periods can become more productive, and once you have enough dinosaurs, you can start getting those moments of unexpected excitement that ask for some responsive play.
Jurassic World Evolution does have free building options, but the game also offers a campaign that helps introduce the systems to you on top of providing goals beyond just making a safe profitable amusement park. The story sees you working on parks across Las Cinco Muertes, a set of five islands that all have their own issues to make park building a bit tougher. One is a failed business where you need to identify what to cut and keep to bring it back from the red, another has so little building space that you’ll be left trying to squeeze in buildings by pixels. Jurassic World Evolution plays well with keyboard and mouse as well as a controller, useful building tools and information screens never too hard to find, and besides some fiddling with trying to place things just so at times, you won’t often get held up by them save for the fact the response teams have you set on controlling them by default instead of assigning them tasks, it not always feasible to drive out there yourself if you are multitasking.
Las Cinco Muertes will have its islands unlock one by one as you get each park to a success threshold, but there are three special missions to clear at each location that require a bit of work. You aren’t alone in your rehabilitation of these parks, many characters on hand to offer voiced advice or rewards if your complete their tasks. Jeff Goldblum reprises his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm, a skeptical voice with a curious way of speaking that makes his contributions often the most interesting to hear, but Cabot Finch is a fun addition as well invented for the game. Finch is the kind of businessman who doesn’t realize how dumb he sounds, and since he doesn’t get in your way, his ego and blunders are more a comedic touch to break up people more committed to discussing actual work. The entertainment, science, and security divisions of your workforce all have contracts they offer periodically or sometimes by request that give you short term goals, the player gaining cash rewards and reputation increases for doing things like achieving profit benchmarks, keeping the park safe, or making specific dinosaurs. Once your reputation with a division is strong enough, they’ll offer you more involved missions that can put your park in jeopardy to attempt despite offering unique rewards like new buildings or species. You might need to deliberately house hostile dinosaurs together or release them from their pen to test security measures, responsiveness and planning tested more here than anywhere else in the game. Funnily enough though, if you ignore a division too much, they can sabotage your park, contracts able to add some extra chaos and give you clearer goals than just raising guest numbers to structure the experience.
The dinosaur variety in Jurassic World Evolution is fairly good, there being around 40 even though there are no aquatic animals or pterosaurs. Naturally, big beasts like a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Spinosaurus will be good crowd draws, but if you want some low cost creatures, a herd of Gallimimus or an errant Edmontosaurus will increase your population variety and help draw crowds too. The balancing act makes the work more interesting, and while Jurassic World’s Indominus Rex is the only hybrid available, the DLC does offer a few more even though sadly you just research to make it rather than building the unique species through some special devoted process. The music does a nice job underscoring the play, some gentle wonder found in calm tracks meant to mimic John Williams’s famous score from the films, and while hints of the Jurassic Park theme are perhaps a bit too present, it doesn’t get obnoxious with too much use. Funnily enough, they boisterous Jurassic Park theme in full force accompanies unlocking new parks in Las Cinco Muertes, something that was undermined by the warning I got each time that the save was corrupted as it happened. It seemed to only be the autosave and all manual saves were fine though, and besides a few things like seeing a Diplodocus’s long body sometimes inevitably clip through the environment, there aren’t many technical issues to point to. A challenge mode does try to add longevity by giving you limited time to complete certain objectives, but it is much stricter than the campaign and probably only for the most devoted player to really give any attention to.
THE VERDICT: Jurassic World Evolution does a great job realizing its stars, the dinosaurs themselves looking great and tending to them having a nice sense of discovery and the potential to go awry in the chaotic ways it should. Sometimes the systems are a little fiddly when it comes to putting them back in their enclosures and getting them happy again, but the more present issue is the time it can take to get a park rolling. A good amount of time it spent waiting on money to roll in and tasks like fossil expeditions to complete, the other tasks in your parks like building not involved enough to fill these periods. Having to balance available space with an appealing and profitable park does still have its moments once you have a comfortable amount of cash to work with and elements like the contracts keep you working towards more specific goals, but while the calm can sometimes let you bask in the little dinosaur habitats you’ve worked so hard to make, it can also lead to aimless moments since there aren’t enough tasks with depth to busy yourself with.
And so, I give Jurassic World Evolution for PC…
An OKAY rating. Tending to your dinosaur enclosures and the needs of each individual dino are enjoyable tasks with a nice sense of experimentation despite the sometimes tedious waits it can take to even form a viable clone. It does feel a bit like Jurassic World Evolution is unsure how much focus to pull away from the animals though, the other actions involved in managing your park sometimes underbaked. You don’t get to determine the ticket price even and once you hit guest thresholds your only option to get more people coming is to plop down hotels to house them, solutions often straightforward and involving minor tinkering rather than deeper thought. Having to contend with the tight spaces of the islands does make the end results more rewarding though, a player feeling particularly smart if they can manage to make popular enclosures and thriving entertainment businesses rather than them feeling like inevitabilities. Sandbox lets you go a little more wild even though you’re still beholden to waits, and a speed up option really does feel like it would do a lot. It’s not like it would necessarily remove the chance for things to go awry, even old Sim City games would immediately halt the action when a disaster hits after all so it’s not like a velociraptor pack should be able to chew up all your guests just because you wanted to speed up things for a bit. Instead, Jurassic World Evolution lets things simmer a bit too often before you’ve built up a reserve of cash, this perhaps an effort to get you to invest in less valuable dinos first but it’s not like plopping down the big names will automatically make your park profitable either. Most of the hangups in playing Jurassic World Evolution are at least the things a management simulator fan might be expecting, downtime not such a detriment that you can’t enjoy the process of building up your dinosaur park. Still, more meaningful activities could have been added to keep your productive work, not necessarily with things like contracts but perhaps smaller ways to influence success that you could tweak while eggs are incubating or teams are out digging.
Jurassic World Evolution is just the first in its series and sequels often provide a chance for refinement. Unlike the Jurassic Park films where trying to house dinosaurs and charge admission for seeing them is a repeated mistake, making more Jurassic World Evolution games will just bring us closer to fulfilling the fantasy of running such a theme park. Jurassic World Evolution isn’t a bad start, attention was given to the key parts that really were necessary for its survival, and if it had just been a one-off, it would be a bit slow and simple at parts but still deliver on giving you your own Jurassic World to mold.