Jurassic World Evolution brings back warm memories of playing Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis on my PS2 some 15 years prior. In fact, comparisons to JPOG are well deserved as many of the features found there, find themselves finding a new home in the spiritual successor JW: Evolution.
JW: Evolution is distinctly different however, namely in that its far more dense of a game with numerous layers that only reveal themselves over a lengthy island progression system. With numerous customizable options for nearly every building and dinosaur it can seem overwhelming at first but you’ll soon find yourself comfortably chipping away at new technologies and specimens.
This is arguably where JW:Evolution is at its strongest. The game’s progression system rewards the player for successful park management with resources to produce better attractions, more buildings, and additional customization. In my experience, this extends the positive feedback the player feels, as they continue to tweak their park far beyond the simple placement of a facility or dinosaur. I would consider this aspect of the game to dominate the early and mid points in the game when you’re working on an island. That’s not to be confused with the other important aspect, your overall progression in the game itself.
Taking a much broader view, the technology and resources you have available to you, become available to be researched or unlocked as you successfully manage a theme park on each island. Though you’re not taking the cash itself with you from island to island- you are however retaining the technology and genetic data you’ve unlocked as you continue to unlock new dinosaurs to be breed. Personally, I’m a huge fan of this mode. Your decisions seem to carry more weight and inspire further gameplay. Not only this, but you can always go back to a previously worked on island to update the park with new advancements you’ve unlocked since playing on the island.
However, this is also where the game tends to take a bit of a turn. The games only glaring drawback isn’t in quality, but in quantity. Now to be clear, I have found the game thus far to be very enjoyable and continues to challenge me to find creative solutions to the problems I face. I’ve come to learn to use tools like the customization system in new ways to benefit my parks and more efficient systems for keeping dinosaurs and guests safe. Which has been excited, fun and dazzling to watch play out.
The problems however do seem to stem from the variety of options available to the player. Lets take the core aspect of the game: building a dinosaur enclosure for your guests and talk through some of the areas I could see the developers tweaking or expanding for the good of the game.
The Island
Perhaps the biggest concern of most players I’ve been following online is the build space available for players. Most of the islands have a smaller space then players would desire to work from, though this could be forgiven assuming there were additional islands in a ‘free play’ mode like the Isla Nublar map. But seeings as roughly 4 of the 6 maps are on the smaller side, it’s not unreasonable for fans to be a bit annoyed by the constraints of the map size.
I would argue a lot of this comes from the natural beauty of the game. The developers have done a quality job rendering an environment you can’t help but love to explore and you want to provide that to not only your park guests, but your dinosaurs as well. As a result of the map size however, this typically leads to smaller enclosures, or limited variety of species as a result. I can’t tell you how many of my parks have become a mental rubrics cube to find better solutions for packing attractions together. But as mentioned, for the ‘main game’ component of I think this is actually really fun. It’s challenging and encourages creative gameplay. But what happens when players are looking to simply relax from the main campaign? Unfortunately, their options are limited.
Breeding
Once you’ve established yourself on the island and setup your animal enclosure you’re almost ready to start breeding. For the sake of argument we’re going to say we’ve already unlocked a number of dinosaurs and enough genetic material that we can begin interchanging segments of the dinosaurs DNA. For starters, I really like this system and it provides some interesting opportunities, but at the moment most the options available to you don’t appear to provide clear payoff.
While it’s true you can breed animals that are more aggressive for a higher star rating, many of the other options don’t directly have a payoff that effects your bottom line. You can extend the age of the animals, which a nice perk and in my experience the only real counter argument to a higher star rating. But defense isn’t that worthwhile unless you plan on your dinosaurs fighting to the death and resistence to disease really isn’t that big of a threat. The remaining genetic components all work against you too. Viability of the embryo decreases with further alterations and incubation costs increase. As a result you’re left with largely similar animals, regardless of if they’re slightly more aggressive or live a bit longer.
This is where I feel the development team could be leaning into this concept a bit harder. It’s perhaps just my opinion, but the animal behavior should be clearly reflective of the genetic modifications. Lets say I breed a Triceratops, in my experience even making it the most aggressive form possible will still result in a pretty easily manageable animal in my park (not always the case with carnivores). Whereas what I would like to see is an animal that is locking horns with members of its species, territorial to jeeps and other dinosaur species and generally just more easily annoyed by outside factors. Alternatively an animal that’s been made to live longer should be more passive, more relaxed, and it’s behavior should reflect that. Perhaps it spends more time in pools of water rolling around in the mud. Or running through fields, or perhaps ironically eating so much additional food it has a habit of getting sick as a result.
This leads to another point, that I don’t think completely warrants it’s own section, but is worth noting: the dinosaur behaviors could use some additional work. What we have now is fun and it’s great to check in on the animals once in a while and see what they’re up to. Typically though, it’s the same general stuff. Drinking, communicating in a triangle formation, eating or running around in a field. I can understand having 40+ species can make for custom animations on this scale nearly impossible for a studio looking to release a product, but future updates should almost certainly include an AI / Animations update. Each species or perhaps family group if you will- should have a few custom behaviors associated with them. For instance, perhaps the Trics love finding a good tree to scratch their tusks against like elephants, or the T-Rex prefers to hunt from the hidden foliage of the jungle before charging its prey. Even just a few custom behaviors could really add a lot of value to the game, fundamentally change how you’re building and managing your park.
Upgrading
You’ve done it! You’ve created a bunch of dinosaurs, your park is producing some profit and you’re well on your way to expanding your network of attractions. But this is where the next problem creeps in. While it’s true you can upgrade nearly all the buildings in the game the problem still remains that there’s a ruefully limited numbers of creative options for improving sections of your park. Generally as you work through a park, expanding as you go. You typically aren’t spending a lot of time returning to old sections of the park to add hot dog stands, park benches, information kiosks, signs, and the like- because none of those things exist in the current game. In fact, this seems like some an obvious omission from the game, I can’t help but wonder if time was instead dedicated to adding dinosaurs, rather than some of the smaller and honestly- more frequent elements I would expect from a theme park sim. For this reason, I think its almost inconceivable that the developers won’t add these elements to a DLC or patch down the road.
Crunching the Numbers
This is a small area that a lot of fans may not be hyping for and it’s certainly not at the top of my priority list. It is likely however that once implemented it would almost be inconceivable to leave out. What JW: Evolution needs is a more in-depth system of understanding what I’ve thought is the most important park asset: the visitor.
Unfortunately, there’s currently no graphical data that shows me the population of visitors over time, the attractions they view most favorably, their annoyances, how tired they are and so forth. As a result, the game appears to not really pit the visitors as all that important of a asset. They’re money making machines where more is more, but beyond that- they’re simply good dino-bait for when things go wrong.
Whereas the dinosaurs do have stats you can review and make changes to your park as a result of their comfort levels. Now to be clear, that’s great and I really do love the intimacy you can feel towards any of your animals, including the ability to name them. But I believe its a mistake to cast the visitors as simply a side effect of the dinosaurs who’s only purpose is to generate more money by purchasing gift shop items and burgers. As a player you’re effectively being held accountable to the care of the dinosaurs, but once their comfort levels have been achieved- your job is over. There’s no ‘journey’ you’re taking with the dinosaurs, because their environment isn’t changing in the same way your visitors are as they move throughout your park. For this reason, I believe this is where the late game actually suffers the most.
Late Game
Because the late game is easy to create souring profits with little to no risk of running out of extendible capital. You’ve created enough dinosaur attractions that you have guests gushing through the gate, spending more money once they’re there and then… well who cares? They’ve served their purpose at that point. But as a player you now have unlimited funds, perhaps more of the island to expand upon, but still a small variety of tools to build better attractions. The result of having that extra cash no longer serves a purpose, because as a player your timidness to spend that money has vanished and it quickly becomes apparent that you can build a new attraction with the same formula you have previously. Effectively, there is no hot dog stands or benches you can add to cater to your visitors deeper needs, there are no ‘rubbing tree’s’ you can plant for your Triceratops to improve their lives.
I think a good example of how late game blues can be flipped on its head comes from an unlikely source. In recent years the Total War series has begun to introduce a late game challenge. Once you’ve achieved certain aspects of the game, a new bold challenge confronts the player as a result of their success. While I’m not completely sure how this develops in a JW: Evolution game, this could be anything from an uptick in tropical storms or perhaps guests simply become more needy and demand better attractions, more transportation options or higher quality establishments, like restaurants over fast food. But it would be contained within that 4 to 5 star stretch your park passes through and provide a lasting challenge before completing their 5 star park. But that’s all a pipe dream on my end, because as it currently stands, the late game of an island is generally just grinding through whatever contracts or mission you have left.
Final Impressions
This is easily the best Jurassic Park / World game I’ve played- not that there’s been many. But regardless this is still a fun game where I will undoubtably waste a lot of my free time. I truly hope the development team intends to not only expand upon this game’s core aspects, but also dig deeper into what they’ve already accomplished.
As mentioned there’s plenty of things you may find yourself wishing they added and it’s truly my hope that they do add more meaningful content over time.
6/10
