Jurassic World Evolution – Review

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With the movie franchise getting an uplift with the recent films titled Jurassic World which is more like a theme park emphasis to the franchise, Frontier have brought us a new take on the sandbox style games with Jurassic World Evolution which compares the parks from all the films titled the five deaths (island names from the films based in Costa Rica).

I will say playing this game all last week gave me a new love for the franchise, I watched all the films back to back on the weekend and knew every dinosaur that appeared from my knowledge gained playing the game. Who says you can’t learn anything playing games?

With that let’s get into the meat of this review.

I have the pleasure of having access to this game on two platforms (Xbox One and Windows PC) my original thoughts were that the control system on console sandbox games is up and down, Halo Wars very easy and simple, The Sims 4 on console…big no no! So I tried it on console first and was amazed at the ease the game felt, it was smooth and reacted really well, especially when a storm hits your park and you have to react quickly. When playing on PC it felt very slow and unresponsive, this may be due to the fact that I was so comfortable with the console layout. I did, however, plug my Xbox controller into my PC and straight away had an Xbox version on my PC so that made it easier.

Visually the game is beautiful for a sandbox game, the textures look fine in a zoomed out mode and when you hatch a new dinosaur the level of detail is really accurate. The weather effects really make the game come to life, with the wind and rain effects on the ground and even the dinosaurs getting that wet look that hair products promise to give us.

As I mentioned before you have five islands that you must work on which are all part of the five deaths story from the films, the first films island Isla Nubela (Jurassic Park) is a straight sandbox island for you to mess around with, you have unlimited money and no missions to take on. You can adjust the settings like no weather effects and no dinosaur escapes which makes it really easy. The only issue with it is unless you research all available dinosaurs you have limited access to a good variety of dinosaurs for your guests to enjoy. It is a good island to hone your craft and get better at the game though.

The first island is the tutorial island called Isla Matanceros which only has rain as a weather effect and this doesn’t affect the dinosaurs which are good to play around with. You will be tasked to complete missions for three factions in the game, Science, Entertainment and Security. Most of the time one mission for one will piss off the others so you need to do work evenly with them all on each island. This is also a good thing as each faction gives you perks and unlocks per island, some give you research on new dinosaurs and others perks like upgrades for buildings and also new decors for your dinosaurs (most of the good ones are unlocked once you five star an island though).

I won’t go into the other islands but I will say some are a real challenge especially when a storm hits, the number of breakouts I had on some islands and have failed to deal with it which has resulted in my finances going so far into the red the only real way to escape is to restart the island and start again.

There are 42 types of dinosaurs for you to research this is done through the expedition building and then you uncover the fossils and upgrade the genomes from them fossils, once you get to 100% of that said dinosaur you can modify them to your heart’s extent… one condition… you have a research centre to unlock new strands of DNA for dinosaurs and you upgrade your creation labs where the dinosaurs are created. The reason I say this is if you modify a dinosaur so much you run the risk of the egg failing and dying so it’s best to work towards getting incubation safety which adds to the protection of the eggs.

There is an interesting thing on Jurassic World Evolution I have the deluxe edition which gives you access to five new dinosaurs but you have to unlock them to use them. At first, I felt this was a con but then it made me realise, play the game more to unlock them, this is a good idea instead of just paying for more content developers should allow you to do this but you have to play to get it still. Imagine buying a pack on FIFA but you have to play to unlock the players, this takes out that gambling element to the game. Well, that’s my opinion anyway.