“Jurassic Park” came out in 1993 and blew my little
10-year-old mind. Now 25(!)-years later and I still love the franchise and
dinosaurs in general. I also really loved 2003’s Jurassic Park: Operation
Genesis game on PS2/Xbox/PC. Why does any of this backstory matter? Because it
puts into context my excitement and expectations for the spiritual successor to
Operation Genesis, Jurassic World: Evolution from Frontier Developments. The
good news is that Evolution really is Operation Genesis 2, just with much
better visuals and loads more dinosaurs to choose from. The bad news is that it
is a little unstable on Xbox One and doesn’t quite have enough “stuff" to
really fill out as a complete park building sim. In spite of that, however,
I’ve had a really, really great time with it and think most other dinosaur fans
will too. See our full Jurassic World: Evolution review for all of the details.Game Details
- Publisher: Frontier Developments
- Developer: Frontier Developments
- ESRB Rating: “T" for Teen
- Genre: Simulation
- Pros: 40+ amazing dinosaurs; nice visuals; music and sounds from the movies; satisfying gameplay
- Cons: Crashes a lot; not enough room to build; having to unlock everything; needs more “stuff”
- MSRP: $60
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| Buy Jurassic World Evolution at Amazon |
Jurassic World: Evolution is a park building simulator where your objective is to build the next Jurassic Park / World and attract visitors in order to make loads of money. There isn’t a story here, but Jeff Goldblum, B.D. Wong, and Bryce Dallas Howard did do some voice work for the game though it only comes up pretty infrequently. Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcom sounds especially bored and phoned in, by the way.
Saying there is “no" story isn't quite accurate,
actually. The main chunk of the game takes place on five distinct islands, each
with different land shapes and weather patterns and other things. You have to
unlock each island one by one by building a successful park on each one, and
your “story” in the game is how your unique parks come together and how you
deal with the various challenges and missions that pop up. For example, one
island has tons of severe storms, so you have to plan around it. Another island
has a Dennis Nedry-style saboteur you have to deal with. Each island also has
three main missions that give you complex tasks to make your science,
entertainment, and security managers happy and these missions are generally
pretty fun and satisfying. For the most part, though, you’re free to just build
whatever you want however you want, provided you have the funds and space for
it.
Space is an issue in Jurassic World: Evolution,
unfortunately, as none of the islands are particularly large and the buildable
area on each one is fairly confined. This is somewhat disappointing if you’re
looking to build the sprawling dinosaur park of your dreams, but I honestly
don’t mind it. Only having limited space, and having oddly shaped building
areas like the long and skinny Isla Pena or circular Isla Sorna provide unique
challenges that make planning out your parks fun and interesting. Obviously,
having a big open area to just shape and build however you want would be nice
(and might be coming down the line, who knows?) but I’m not too upset that it
isn’t included here.
During normal gameplay on the five islands you have to earn
money by building paddocks, cloning dinosaurs, and dotting your park with
restaurants and gift shops for starry eyed tourists to blow their money in. You
also have to send dig teams to find new fossils and amber in order to clone new
dinosaurs as well as do research to prevent diseases, alter the genetic code of
your dinos, or build new attractions for your park. The fossil hunting and
research aspects of the game feel a little like a mobile game where you just
click on stuff on a menu and wait for a timer to run out when the task is done
so you can do it all again, but I don’t mind it since I don’t really know how
else they’d do it. Having that one aspect be a little mindless isn’t a deal
breaker.
Actually building your park is more interesting, thankfully. You have limited
control over terrain and can freely place water and forests wherever you want.
You then place power plants, pathways, and power lines as well as hotels,
restaurants, gift shops, park ranger stations, ACU stations, research labs, and
more. You also have to build the cloning facilities to start pumping out the
dinosaurs as well as building different types of fences to keep different types
of dinosaurs inside. It all works really well even with a controller on PS4 /
Xbox One.
As you progress on each island you unlock new facilities and
dinosaurs to play with. You can then, of course, go back to your earlier
islands with your new toys and make them better, so the game has some decent
replay value. A nice touch is that you can restart an island in the menu, but
that doesn’t reset your research and other progress so you can restart your
first island and rebuild with later game dinos and facilities. Because, as I
mentioned, each island has unique areas and challenges, going back and
rebuilding with your newfound knowledge and toys can keep you playing for quite
a while.
Of course, there IS also a sandbox mode, though it isn’t
quite what you may be hoping for. Fairly early on you unlock Isla Nublar from
“Jurassic Park” and "Jurassic World" which serves as the sandbox for
the game. You have unlimited money here to build whatever you can dream up, but
it has limited space (though the area is larger than the other islands) and you
can only use things that you unlocked by playing on the other islands. It takes
a solid 15-20 hours to unlock most of the dinosaurs and facilities on the other
islands, which can be kind of a drag if you’re hoping to just jump into the
sandbox and do whatever you want. It’s definitely fun to play the rest of the
game and unlock stuff, but you might be
burnt out and tired of the game by that point and won’t want to play the
sandbox mode. I didn't get tired of it yet, but you might.
I do have a couple of complaints about the game, though.
First off, it crashes fairly frequently on Xbox One. The game has a pretty good
autosave system – basically any time anything happens (mission updates, fossil
team comes back, research completes, you building anything) – so you don't ever
lose much progress, but having it crash to the dashboard every other play
session (and it’s never consistent, either) gets old after a while.
My other complaint is that there just isn’t enough
“stuff" in the game to really build the park of your dreams. The number of
dinosaurs isn’t the problem (there are 40+ species available and a new “Fallen
Kingdom" free DLC pack just added 6 more), but there isn't a ton of
variety in the types of enclosures you can build, types of shops, or types of
rides / attractions you can make. All of the islands have identical green tropical
jungle motifs, too, so more variety there would have been appreciated. You also
can’t build guided tours (Ford Explorers on a track) from “Jurassic Park",
which would have been amazingly fun. On that note, I would have also
appreciated more nods to the first movie (you do unlock the JP1 Jeep Wrangler,
at least) like the original Visitors Center or the big King Kong gate, but none
of that is included here and instead it all looks like "Jurassic
World" instead. Hopefully, more stuff like this will be added as DLC, but
I can’t say for sure.
The presentation is very nice overall in Jurassic World:
Evolution. The menus are clean and easy to read and the interface is fairly
intuitive. Most importantly, of course, the dinosaurs themselves look fantastic
and have great animation. Just watching the dinosaurs roam around and interact
(and fight) with each other is really fantastic. You can also fly a helicopter
or drive a Jeep right into the enclosures for an even closer view. The game
seamlessly scales from views high above your park right down to ground level
and it’s really impressive. I didn't have any noticeable framerate issues
during my playtime so far, but I also didn’t ever cram as many dinosaurs onto
the map as I could, either. In fact, I don’t actually know what the maximum
limit on dinosaurs is (though it is definitely considerably higher than the
limit of 60 in the original Operation Genesis).
Sound-wise, Jurassic World: Evolution is solid. The music
and dinosaur sound effects are taken straight from the movies, so they sound
amazing. There is a lot of voice work, but most of it sounds (literally) phoned
in. Still, just hearing that iconic t-rex roar is enough for me to give the
sound a thumbs up overall.
All in all, Jurassic World: Evolution is a solid dinosaur
park building sim. It does have some flaws such as limited building space and
not enough variety of pieces to build your park with, but the core experience
is very, very good and the complaints can (hopefully) be addressed via DLC.
I’ve had a great time playing the game and I think anyone else that loves
dinosaurs and loves the Jurassic franchise will enjoy it as well. It isn’t as
deep and complex of a park building sim as some others on the market, but it is
great looking and satisfying and does a great job of letting you play with
freaking awesome dinosaurs. The $60 MSRP may be a tad high, but you can easily
get 25-30 hours of play out of it, which seems worth it to me but you’ll have
to decide that for yourself. Overall, Jurassic World: Evolution is a ton of
fun. Buy it.
