Jeff Goldblum lends his recognizable-anywhere voice to some of the narration as Dr. Ian Malcolm, and he’s clearly having a lot of fun with the pronunciation of the islands’ names – just wait until you hear him say “Isla Matanceros” in the opening flyover cutscene – but otherwise it very much sounds like his first read-through of the script. Opposite him are a handful of Jurassic World actors, including Bryce Dallas Howard and B.D. Wong, and then there’s someone voicing Chris Pratt's character who doesn’t even seem to be making an attempt at impersonating him.
In this simple business sim, the idea is to build dino-zoo parks across five samey looking tropical islands, plus a samey looking sandbox island. Granted, it makes some sense for all of the islands in a region to be blanketed in the same jungles and grassy fields, but if you’ve ever been to the Big Island of Hawaii and seen how dramatically the environment can change in just a 15-minute drive – from jungle to forest to Mars-like volcanic wastelands – a little visual variety would’ve been nice.
But just like the park-going public, we’re here to see dinosaurs, and their detailed models and animations are the best thing about Jurassic World Evolution. There are 42 different species available, and watching everything from the nimble gallimimus to the lumbering brachiosaurus roam around the screen making movie-authentic noises is great the first few times. (My almost-three-year-old son absolutely loves them.)
The problem is, the process of unlocking and improving their genomes is painfully dull and repetitive, and doing it 42 times is a special kind of tedium. It almost seems like something out of a bad mobile game: You go to the map screen and click on the dots representing dig sites around the globe where you have a chance to discover fossils from a set of species to send your dig team, then wait for the roughly two-minute timer to expire. Then you go to a separate screen where you see the random assortment of fossils you’ve acquired – resembling a lootbox-style card pack – to click on the fossils to research or sell them. You only want to sell them if you’ve already fully researched that dino’s genome, or if it’s a valuable rock with no dino-DNA, so there’s no actual decision-making happening here, just mandatory robotic actions. And then you repeat that cycle, dozens and dozens of times, until you’ve done them all. I don’t know if this is intended to replicate the real paleontology work of scrubbing an unearthed fossil with a toothbrush, but if anything it’s less fun.
It’s also a let-down that, among these 42 species, there are no flying or swimming dinosaurs [Edit: fine, pterosaurs and aquatic lizards] in the mix. Without pteranodons or a mosasaurus, it’s impossible to recreate the first Jurassic World movie, even on the sandbox island. For the record, that unlimited-money sandbox mode must be unlocked, and even then you can only play with the dinosaurs and buildings you’ve unlocked in the campaign, so there’s no avoiding playing the boring part of Jurassic World Evolution, which – based on my roughly two dozen hours of play – could take upwards of 30 to unlock everything.
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Once you’ve unlocked a dinosaur, you have to roll the dice to see if you get to create them. Every dinosaur has a viability percentage based on how much of their genome you’ve researched and which stat-modifying gene mods you’ve applied, and that affects whether or not they end up as a towering majestic beast or a scrambled egg brunch that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Bringing a long-extinct creature back from the dead shouldn’t be easy, granted, but in a game where you’re effectively gambling with having to spend more time playing a dull game to get what you want, losing that bet is just depressing.
That’s much worse here than in most similar city-builder games because, bizarrely, there’s no way to speed up time to skip long stretches of waiting for cash to roll in or dinosaurs to hatch. In everything from SimCity to Frostpunk, speeding up time avoids the doldrums of awaiting a paycheck, so even if your in-game performance (if you’re going for efficiency) takes a hit, the pace of play isn’t significantly impacted. But here, if you’re making $100,000 per minute and you want to incubate a dinosaur that costs $1,000,000 and has a 70% chance of viability, that’s 10 minutes of gameplay (in which you spend no money, so you’re doing basically nothing) you’re wagering against a 30% chance you’re going to have to spend another 10 minutes doing very little. Having played quite a bit, I’m not inclined to take that bet.
Actually building your park is basic but mostly intuitive, and the road and fence tools work well enough. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated by not being able to plop a road or building where it seems like I should be able to, but the almost completely inconsequential cost of raising or lowering ground levels (or adding or removing water or forests) to the terrain makes it pretty easy to place whatever you want wherever you want it. Power is the only resource to worry about, but you get the sense it’s only really there so they can have outages like in the movies.
But the reason building is so dull is that most of the maps are tightly constrained, so there’s not much room for creativity. And even when there is room, there aren’t a ton of options for buildings to choose from to make a park feel like your own – at least, not until you’ve unlocked everything, by which point you’ll probably have long since grown tired of the grind of fulfilling the objectives of the three factions: security, science, and entertainment.
These three departments will pop up with objectives every so often to attempt to give you direction, but almost invariably they’re things you were going to do anyway, for rewards that are barely worth noticing. “Research a new dino’s genome up to 60%!” Yeah, I was doing that. “Increase your income to $150K!” Yes, I’m at $145K right now and in the process of placing the thing that will get me above $150K. “Sell two of these $350K-each dinosaur for $100K; we’ll give you $200K as a reward!” Well, that makes no sense, but fine, because that helps me unlock some new buildings.
Every mission you complete from one of the factions angers the other two, so you have to focus on one at a time to unlock their specific upgrades before moving to the next one. But that means the other two factions will be mad at you, and that would be very scary if the “sabotage” acts they engage in weren’t so pathetic and ineffectual. “Oh no, we’ve given three dinosaurs a disease! What will you do?” Well, I’ll send a ranger team or two to stick them with blowdarts and cure them immediately, rendering the entire thing moot. As long as there’s no coinciding storm or something equally beyond my control to randomly mess me up, I’m fine. I suppose that was true of Dennis Nedry’s sabotage as well, but John Hammond wasn’t having a good gameplay experience in that situation, either.
So most of the time, you’re sitting around performing mandatory boring tasks like ordering your jeeps to resupply feeding stations or curing random disease outbreaks. You can fill some of the downtime by taking direct control and cruising around in a jeep or helicopter, but there’s not much to do with those vehicles outside of taking photos of dinosaurs (the more appealing option for people who just want to watch these animals in action) or tranquilizing dinosaurs from the air for sport. But there’s never a “must go faster” moment because even the most ferocious-looking dinosaurs just ignore you – there’s no concept of your vehicles taking damage.
Shooting tranq darts at dinosaurs sounds like fun – and it really should be. But even when you’ve researched and equipped some upgrades for it, firing slow-moving, fast-dropping darts that reload slowly at smaller, fast-moving targets like velociraptors from a helicopter is just not fun. I found I was much better off letting the AI handle it in the event of a breakout, which it does with reasonable effectiveness once you buy the upgrades that raise the apparently deliberately annoying limitation on how many tasks you can queue up for it at once.
One of the really frustrating things about the way you’re evaluated is how it’s split between Dinosaur Rating and Park Rating. Yes, both contribute to your overall rating, which is how unlocks are doled out. But the fact that only the Dinosaur Rating determines how much money you make means you can completely neglect the Park Rating – that's everything from monorail transportation to clothes shopping and bowling alleys – until your dinosaurs are drawing in enough money that none of those things matter. I routinely set all my shops to have maximum staff and literally give away the most expensive merchandise for free to maximize their effect on park-goer happiness because the amount of money they cost is negligible after I’ve built up my park a bit. That’s just bizarre, and a broken simulation of how a park should work.
What’s sad is that that these park-goers never pipe up to let you know they’re awed by a huge apatosaurus or grossed out by a velociraptor disemboweling something in front of them makes the whole thing feel artificial. You can’t select them to see how they’re feeling at all – you just get a chart showing their overall happiness, as determined by their food, drink, shopping, transportation, and dinosaur visibility (which is in turn determined by where you place your viewing point structures). It all feels extremely artificial.
The challenge that eventually emerges in Jurassic World Evolution isn’t managing the economy, because that’s simple. It’s not hitting the simplistic mission goals that pop up, because half of the time you’re most of the way to beating those objectives before they’re issued. It’s not even repairing random storm damage, because that’s done by sending out your jeeps to instantly fix most of it. No, the tough part is jamming together as wide a variety of dinosaurs as possible in as small an area as possible without making them angry – that’s the puzzle we’re supposed to solve. And once wikis work out which dinosaurs can co-exist, in what numbers, in a pen with the same proportions of forest and grassland, that will be no problem at all.
And of course, you can have your dinosaurs fight for your entertainment and to build up their “combat infamy” rating. But when the outcome is just a roll of the dice, you get really frustrating situations like when my first $2 million T-rex was immediately killed in its first tussle with a $600K ceratosaurus. On top of that, unlike the pit fights in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, you already own both combatants, so no matter who wins, you lose because you paid to incubate the loser. And even if you do have a winner who you manage to fatten up with a bunch of wins, all of your dinosaurs will die of old age sooner than you’d expect anyway, so all the effort of setting up those fights doesn’t feel worth it.
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