Jurassic World Evolution Review

​We finish our Jurassic Park review series with not the latest in the franchise of films. I will watch that and review it later, but with the most recent video game based on the property, Jurassic World: Evolution. Where you can live up to John Hammond’s dreams and literally spare no expense in the creation of a dinosaur park of your dreams.
 
Now fair warning, a lot of people tried to hype this game up as a spiritual sequel to Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, one of the best park building games of all times. Although, there are similarities, we are going into this review that this game is its own game, not building up to the hype of nor trying to reach the heights of Operation Genesis.
 
Evolution is a 2018 park building simulation developed by Frontier Developments, who have worked on Planet Coaster and many others. The game is loosely based on the fourth installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World. In the game you are constructing dinosaur amusement parks on the Cinca de Meurtes or the Five Deaths as they are known in the Jurassic Park universe. Your sites will be the successor of both the original Jurassic Park as well as it’s unfortunate successor, Jurassic World.
 
Your goals are to create the parks and researching both new dinosaurs and fitting your parks with attractions to achieve a five-star rating. For example, the first Island, Isla Matanceros will reward you with the sand box mode of Isla Nublar if you score five stars on it. More on that later. The five islands are Isla Matanceros, Isla Muerta, Isla Tacano, Isla Pena and of course Isla Sorna. The game features Jeff Goldblum voicing Ian Malcom as your guide through the parks. He is the voice of reason and skeptical of the three branches within the park.
 
The game features three interesting branches of play, Security, Entertainment and Science all led by colorful casts of characters. Beyond just giving you access to different dinosaurs, buildings, and genes. These three characters introduce the plot of the game. Yes, there is a plot. Although, it is loosely tied to the films, and unfortunately is does not a have a true ending. This is either showing that Frontier will be working on more DLC or perhaps something else will be released later. It is sad, because there is a lot of build up with not a true ending where anything you did really matters. The plot is pretty much just padding, and although interesting the branches of play only really become annoying rather than helpful.
 
The problem with the three division branches comes in the form of sabotage. If you are too nice with one of the branches and not enough with the others, then the ones with no loyalty to you will begin to sabotage your park. This can be anything simple like opening your gates to getting you dinosaurs sick. Even worse they can shut down the power in your mark, which forces you to manually boot up the power in a jeep. In early game it can be frustrating, but I feel it does give a game a challenge occasionally. It’s a good system in theory, but as you will see a lot of this game is better in theory than in practice.
 

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The Good
            Overall the graphics and models look nice. Some of the buildings and foliage is lacking. But, it looks nice and is well designed. It just isn’t very different from each other. But, it at least is pretty and great to look at. Graphics wise it is a beautiful game, but that is probably its only high mark. It’s a pretty park, with a lot of problems within the gears of how the game functions.
The dinosaur models look amazing. They are Jurassic Park dinosaurs after all and are not scientifically accurate for the most part. But, they look damn gorgeous. Speaking about gorgeous dinosaurs you can breed dinosaurs with different skins. I love testing out new skins and giving dinosaurs different traits.
The genome system in the game can be tedious. But, the pay off can be what I think Frontier wanted. If you want an aggressive dinosaur that can break out. You can build a nasty and violent T-Rex. Do you want a Triceratops that can take out the king of dinosaurs? You can do that as well. The mix and match of traits and genes is quite diverse, and I do enjoy tinkering within the main game and on the sandbox.
The risk/reward for big dinosaurs as well as for siding with one Division over another brings challenge to the game. But, after a certain point it reaches a plateau and doesn’t get that difficult. Once you know how the game works, you won’t have to worry. But, by that time you can have fun managing each of your islands.
 
The game can be challenging when it wants to. Pena especially was a challenge being small and dark with storms. You really have to use strategy there, and it is also where you get some of the larger dinosaurs. The story also built up post Pena and up to Sorna. But, one of the reasons Sorna was a disappointment was because the story that had built so much up to that point especially after Pena failed to bring any of the expectations to fruition. We may never get a proper finished story, and it might had been just fluff in the end. But, for what it was worth, I enjoyed the story once it picked up, only to be disappointed in the end. 

​Minor Gripes
            Continuing with my problems with the game, these are things that I feel are problematic, but don’t make the game any worse. They don’t really hold the game back and are more minor complaints.
The focus is the lack of variety. Dinosaurs are sat into groups: small carnivores, large carnivores, armored herbivores, small herbivores, herbivores and large herbivores. All the dinosaurs fit neatly into these groups and all have similar animations. Not to mention the variety within each of these groups are surely lacking especially the smaller dinosaurs.
Another minor gripe is the focus on Jurassic Park/Jurassic World style dinosaurs. I get it, we won’t get feathered raptors in a Jurassic Park game. But, T-Rex is king not to mention the bigger dinosaurs are the main drive of the game. Which does have its own risks and rewards I suppose but is sort of lack luster. I want more dinosaur species, and I would like them to be a bit more adventurous on the types of dinosaurs that are on display.
I would personally love the focus to be more on a zoo tycoon type game and less of a Jurassic World disaster ready to happen. That is fine in the story and is implemented to some success. But, I shouldn’t have to worry every second about my park going to ruin. We play park building games to build something that lasts, not watch as it is destroyed by masquerading idiots in one of the park divisions who got mad we didn’t pay too much attention to them.
Finally, the animation is beautiful when it is done right. It is quite limited and once you see a dinosaur fight, you have seen it all. Also, the animation can get clunky sometimes, especially during and after fight scenes. 

The Bad
Let’s dig into the games problems. Although I introduced the Divisions, they are not a problem in the game. If anything, the three divisions showcase and highlight the various problems the game has. I was a bit worried when I heard Frontier believed that things going wrong is what makes the Jurassic Park franchise so good. It means that Frontier tried to create a game where there would always be a chance of a dinosaur breaking out and pushing you to fight an inevitable tide.
My fears were brought to fruition in this game, but I don’t think it is how Frontier intended. You see the dinosaurs in this game are buggy to all hell. The AI of the dinosaurs is by far the worse aspect of this game. For starters their AI is simple and once you look at one dinosaur, you have seen them all. They all have similar animation and personalities. It is the problem with how the game focuses on dinosaur welfare that is a problem.
This game is supposed to be a Jurassic Park zoo tycoon type game or at least was presented as one. It adds the layers of things going wrong, so the bigger dinosaurs have more of a risk due to a variety of factors. Dinosaurs need feed, water, and space and that is all understandable. But, then there is environmental and ecological comfort for the animals. This is generally manifested by making dinos have the right amount of vegetation/grass which is an asinine system.
The reason it is asinine is the AI is influenced by some unknown area around them. If they go close to a fence this interrupts this AI and a dinosaur who was perfectly fine a moment ago will go AWOL, because the fence messing with their comfort layer. This becomes problematic with dinosaurs that have social needs as well. Some of the larger sauropods, all the social stegosaurs but especially the hadrosaurs are very bad at this. They all need massive herds, but the problem is that unknown area will get in the way. If a dinosaur is too far away from its buddies, it will go ballistic the same thing with the others who are far away.
Added to the fact that dinosaurs don’t group in herds. There is no herd mechanism. They just sometimes socialize in a cult like fashion. Added to this big herds and dinos require big space so you must make bigger enclosures to house them, and it is easier for the unknown radius to malfunction and break. I don’t know if this was intended by Frontier, and if it was because they wanted dinosaurs to break out. I have to say, I’m quite disappointed. It doesn’t add to the difficulty, if anything it makes things more annoying. A bad AI system is bad.
Another AI problem involves the carnivores. If they encounter another dinosaur they will kill it. Instead of going for their food or leaving the herbivore alone the dinosaur will go for the kill if it can. This doesn’t help the bio-diversity and forces you to build certain dinosaurs away from each other. There are reasons on why this was implemented, but it makes all the carnivores look like mass-murders instead of predators in an ecosystem.
 







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​While we are talking about bad AI, the guests are even worse. Sometimes when a dinosaur does break out, guests will run into the dinosaurs enclosure… because that is safe. Guests tend to not be very good at running from dinosaurs even when they have an emergency bunker right next to them. The human AI is also in general garbage in terms of the Guests. The guests in this game are way too needy. Sometimes they want more food, less walking time when a rail line is right next to them or a food or gift shop is just down the street from an attraction. Again, this is done by some weird radius. You can supplement this most of the time by adding more employees to a restaurant or shop, but it doesn’t always work.
 
None of this would be a problem if the building placement and terrain tools were not so limited. The building placement tools are so picky about where a building can go. Sometimes you have to flatten the whole area before placing anything. I must go and flatten a whole park before I start due to the game’s asinine building tools. The tools, you use for terrain are limited as well and not only do we need a smaller tool, but we also need a larger size to flatten a park to ensure you can build as much as you can.
An added problem is the size of some of the islands. Now, I understand Matenceros being limited. It is the first island. Also, half of the challenge of Pena and Muerta are its small sizes. But, Isla Sorna is small and a very disappointing island in general. The biggest disappointment is Isla Nublar.
Isla Nublar was hinted at prior to release as something special. When it was revealed to be a sandbox mode, it made many people happy. Only to find out that despite being sandbox it is quite limited. The space is small, and although I myself and many others have made awesome parks out of what we can do, it could have been something truly amazing. It is overall a disappointment and probably in my eyes one of the biggest let downs of the game. We need a better sandbox mode, and Isla Nublar was not as advertised. 

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Gameplay
The AI is terrible, the terrain manipulator tools are limited and dammit we don’t have enough space. They keep adding dinosaurs to the game, so it is near impossible to make a park with all the dinosaurs. It is possible to put all the dinosaurs on Nublar, but they are fit in boxes. It’s a limited system. I think the game should have been in development a bit longer, hopefully Frontier can give this game the things it needs for the gameplay to truly shine.
But, when the game works, it really works. I tend to be so good at planning out my park that I don’t have dinosaurs break out much anymore. There are occasionally problems, but once you unlock all the genes, and know how to keep your dinosaurs and god forbid your guests happy then the game becomes a rather humbling experience. It is also a game I can just go and chill for a while, venting my frustration on dinosaurs who escape from captivity.
The bare bones of the gameplay and many of the decisions don’t make sense, and it seemed rushed. When the gameplay mechanics come together it is a rewarding experience. The AI just needs fixed, the terrain tools need to be increased and the size of Nublar and Sorna needs to be increased. Those three fixes would make the gameplay much more rememberable.
 
Graphics
            The game is beautiful. I don’t think I have said it enough. There is a limited amount of textures for grasses, trees, water and dinosaurs. But, all of it still looks pretty despite these limitations. It seems Frontier put all their money into making the game look shiny and shafted the gameplay. The graphics are the only thing that doesn’t seemed rushed.

Music
Some of the music from the films are used, most of it is interesting that has a JPark feel. But, nothing really of note so I tend to listen to my own music.
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Summary
In summary, Jurassic World: Evolution is a game that has a lot of potential.  It is beautiful game, but it has some flaws in its execution. The AI, both the guests and the dinosaurs need retooled. The islands need better editing tools for terrain and at least Nublar needs to become an actual sandbox with more room. Especially if they are going to add more dinosaurs.
The graphics are pretty, but the animations are lacking, and in general we need more dinosaurs and the game should feel more like a zoo tycoon than a disaster movie. If you chose to make dinosaurs more aggressive and break out, that is all on you. The good thing with great park building games is it lets us choose, and we don’t get a lot of freedom in this game. Instead, we are given a limited and rushed game that could had been much more. 

If you enjoy Jurassic Park/World then this might be something to pick up and play. if you like park building simulators or want a successor to Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis prepare to be disappointed. I still really enjoy the game and will on and off have an idea for a new park, now and then. It has it's flaws ,but despite that I still love the game.