Disclaimer: Review copy provided by publisher
Platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC
Publishers: Frontier Developments
Developers: Frontier Developments
MSRP: $59.99
In the early 2000s, tycoon games were quite popular. We had Rollercoaster Tycoon, Thrillville, Zoo Tycoon, and many more but now, the genre has more or less died off. Sure, there are still games like Planet Coaster that drop every few years but they’re a rarity. One of the newest rarities is Jurassic World Evolution and it’s honestly fantastic at its core.
Whoever thought that matching the Jurassic Park IP with a tycoon game should get a raise because it’s a match made in Heaven. While Jurassic World Evolution lacks fun cheat codes and multiple modes, the standard campaign mode which centers around you building up five different parks is great fun at first but it does eventually run out of steam.
When you’re thrown on your first island, the one and only Jeff Goldblum gives you a few pointers but they don’t really hold your hand beyond that. It can feel a bit daunting at first but once you wrap your head around everything (which you’ll do rather quickly), you realize it’s one of the simplest tycoon games out there. That’s both good and bad. That makes it easily accessible and very casual but it also becomes rather stale in just a few hours.
You’re not given every facility and tool right off the bat and the progression is presented in a way that makes it so you won’t get a lot of them for quite some time but with or without them, you’ll likely feel like you’ve seen everything Jurassic World Evolution has to offer very quickly. You’re given a handful of very similar missions which involve sending teams to dig up fossils and then examining them (aka let a timer run out to get results), improve your park’s ratings, and some other tasks which aren’t super complex.
I never found Jurassic World Evolution to be very challenging, the only times my dinosaurs got loose was when I intentionally set them out to cause chaos or I forgot to fill a gap in a fence I built so they just strolled out of their exhibit. They’re intended to escape if you don’t keep them satisfied but as long as you give them food and water, it’s pretty easy. They don’t need toys or much upkeep, if a dinosaur dies you just have to remove it so it doesn’t cause any diseases.
Jurassic World Evolution is a very surface level tycoon game, one that doesn’t have as much depth as it could. Managing dinosaurs just consists of not mixing different breeds with ones that would fight each other and making sure they’re fed, it’s very barebones and feels a bit odd that the part that lacks the most is the element that should be driving people to buy the game.
Park management is a bit dull as well, having only a few ways to customize things and not a lot of variables to make it feel engaging. The guest shops such as gift shops sell three items and as long as you place them near the entrance, adjust the prices to be a few dollars higher than what they cost for the park to buy them, you’ll rake in millions. It’s an easily manipulated system and once you’re getting millions, you probably won’t even know what to do with all of the money.
You could buy more dinosaurs but unless you mix them in with more hostile breeds, they just kinda roam around and do a whole lot of nothing. Even when they do fight, it feels like you’re watching something that’s rolling the dice based on stats they have to determine the outcome of these one on one fights. It’s cool at first but once you’ve seen it, you’ll realize there’s not much more to it. You can’t cause ridiculous dinosaur wars as they only allow for one on one battles which more or less results in you, the player, losing regardless because you have to pay for all of these animals so if one dies, you just lost money.
It can be fun to let the genetically modified creatures rush around the park and eat people while you control a sniper hanging out the side of a chopper, shooting all of the loose creatures, but even that chaos becomes stale.
The Verdict
Jurassic World Evolution is by no means a bad game, it can be enjoyed, it just can’t be enjoyed for very long. Despite its efforts to try and have a progression system that doesn’t unlock certain features until you go to a new island, there’s not enough to keep the player filled with an urge to want to progress. It’s clear there was a lot of passion and effort put into this game, just not all of it pans out into something totally worthwhile. Perhaps Frontier will add free content updates to make the game feel like it has more meat on its bones but as of right now, it feels more like a petite appetizer for a large meal that isn’t anywhere in sight.
