Frontier Developments (Rollercoaster Tycoon & Zoo Tycoon) is back with a Jurassic Park simulator that makes you fall in love with dinosaurs all over again.
Releasing on June 12th digitally and physically on July 3rd, Jurassic World Evolution is a business simulator game that loosely ties in with the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies. Familiar characters are there, but the game pulls elements from all the movies to create a unique experience.
Story
When it comes to a story, this game does not have one so much as it is really about focusing on your ability to build a park, discover dinosaurs, complete goals, and keep the park visitors safe after disaster inevitably strikes. The game opens with Jeff Goldblum reprising his iconic role as Dr. Ian Malcom, and he has much to say about playing God and impending chaos. Your main goal is to build parks on five different islands. The first island is essentially the tutorial mode. Disaster is rare and the game allows to you get used to the mechanics of building, excavating, completing quests, and making a profit.
Gameplay
Like most business simulators, you’ll be maintaining a bird’s eye view for most of the time. You’ll start by learning to build essential park buildings, making roads to them, ensuring they have power, and incubating your first dinosaur. You can discover more dinosaurs by sending out excavation teams around the world. They’ll bring back fossils or rare DNA in amber that you can analyze to gain dino DNA. Once you have enough of a certain species you’ll be able to incubate and create them. However, there’s a risk the incubation can fail if you have a low percentage of DNA. Additionally, you can discover and research mutations that you can apply to the genome that have different effects on the dinosaurs’ stats and appearance. You’ll have to keep the dinosaurs fed and happy, including healing them if they get injured or sick.
In addition to the dinosaurs, you’ll be able to build other park necessities, such as emergency shelters, gift shops and restaurants, ranger stations, hotels, and more. You can gain more money through ticket and concession sales, but also by completing missions and quests. You’ll have three divisions that you’ll have to please for the most optimal park: Science, Entertainment, and Security. Quests and missions will give you bonuses to one or more divisions.
What’s different about this game versus other business simulators I’ve played is that you can also get hands-on with some of the tasks you can automate. If a dinosaur is sick, you can have the ranger team automatically heal them. You can also take control of the Jeep in a 3rd person view and shoot the dinosaur full of medicine yourself. There’s a bonus if you take photos of dinos as you can sell the pictures for additional money.
take photographs of the dinosaurs and sell the pictures for additional money.
The level of detail in each aspect of the game is both refreshing and surprising — or maybe I haven’t played a business simulator in too long. You can watch your dinosaurs up close and even name each one. If you want, you can even change the terrain of the park by adding or removing trees, shrubs, and water, and raising or lowering terrain.
Graphics
The graphics are surprisingly good and the dinosaur and building models are life-like and detailed. The trees and park visitor models are more generic. As they’re not the focus of the game, it’s not something that stands out as a negative. The textures scale nicely and I didn’t notice any loading issues when zooming in and out. The environmental conditions like rain and storms are realistic and add wonderful atmosphere. Of course, the graphics aren’t as detailed as say, God of War. Still, they’re definitely more detailed than I’m used to seeing in these sort of games.
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Final Thoughts
Normally, business simulators don’t catch my attention as I’m notoriously bad at asset management and the lack of action has me losing interest quickly. Jurassic World Evolution breaks that tradition and I’m already itching to play more. Maybe it’s because it has dinosaurs and the nostalgia of my childhood obsession with Jurassic Park. Maybe it’s because it starts out fairly easy and intuitive before ramping up the difficulty. Whatever the reason, Jurrasic World Evolution is a solid simulator that will tide you over until the next movie releases.