Genre: Business simulation

Mode: Single-player

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Developer: Frontier Developments

Release Date: Available now

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’d be like to build your own Jurassic Park and manage angry guests, disease outbreaks, and dinosaur-on-the-loose breakouts, Jurassic World Evolution is the game you’ve been waiting for. While the game is based on the 2015 film Jurassic World and indeed includes voice acting from stars Bryce Dallas Howard, B.D. Wong, and Jeff Goldblum (the latter of whom reprises his Jurassic Park role in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), the tie-ins to the film franchise are negligible at best, and thankfully Jurassic World Evolution goes all-in on allowing the player to build and manage multiple Jurassic World theme parks.

Indeed, this is a business simulation game in the vein of Roller Coaster Tycoon and Sim City, as you work to build your parks on various islands with increasing degrees of difficulty and rewards. Natural disasters and saboteurs throw a wrench into the best-laid plans, but you’ll also have to tangle with dinosaurs on the loose and profitability. Jurassic World Evolution refreshingly allows the player to get hands-on with these tasks, however, and in the legion of business simulator games, this one is the goods.

The Gameplay

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Image via Universal and Frontier

When you begin the game, you start on the easiest island. There, you’re given a couple basic facilities, but it’s up to you to fill out the rest of the island with further amenities that will make the park thrive, from power plants to gift shops to hotels. You have to make money to spend money, and the best way to make money is to use your Expedition Center to send teams out on fossil digs. Once they arrive back, you can set your teams to extract dinosaur DNA from the various fossils they bring back, and you continue to extract and refine DNA until you have a viable sample from which to create your own dinosaur.

From there, you use your hatching facility to incubate and release various embryos. You create the enclosures, ensure the dinosaurs have plenty of food and water, and set them free. But then comes the managing part of it all—you’ll have to pay attention to your dinosaurs’ specific needs to make sure they're comfortable, or else a breakout is more likely. This adds a delightful degree of managerial difficulty, as you have to juggle multiple species and discover which ones live well alongside one another. Pro-tip: Unless you just want to see some bloodshed, don’t put a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the same enclosure as four Velocripators. I learned this from experience.

But Jurassic World Evolution isn’t only about dinosaurs, and it’s the versatility of gameplay that keeps the player engaged. You can spend some time focusing on your guests, checking the park’s metrics to see where a toy shop or restaurant is most sorely needed. Or you can decide to go hands-on with your Ranger Team, driving a vehicle into an enclosure to manually refill a food dispensary or snap photos of the various dinos—for which you’ll be paid handsomely. You can also take manual control of your Asset Containment Unit’s helicopter, trying your hand at shooting a tranquilizer dart into a dinosaur so that he or she can be transported either to a different enclosure or back into an enclosure after an escape. These tasks can be automated as well, but it’s the choice that makes it fun.

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Image via Universal Studios, Amblin Entertainment, Inc.and Legendary Pictures

There are a number of park additions and dinosaurs that can only be unlocked after getting your island’s rating up to five stars. The main way to move towards these new additions—which include an arcade, a giant visitor’s center, and a monorail system—is to complete “contracts” sent your way by three experts in three fields: Security, Entertainment, and Science. You’ll be sent a contract from one particular category with a task and a reward for completing said task. Tasks can be as benign as simply incubating and hatching a specific dinosaur, or more complicated like ensuring there are no power outages for a certain period of time or keeping your park’s guests total above a certain number.

As soon as you get your first five star rating, a new island unlocks, and so on. These various islands offer new challenges and difficulties, but there’s also one island that unlocks an entire new mode of gameplay: Sandbox. Once you unlock Isla Nublar, you can venture to that island and have complete control over everything with unlimited money. You can only build or use what you’ve gained from the other islands, but here you can control the weather and quite literally spare no expense building the most epic Jurassic World imaginable.

But it’s nice that the game allows both this sandbox play and the more challenging business mode, which is its own kind of reward. I played through about 20 hours of the game and got through three islands, and there was still plenty left to do. Additionally, I played the game on Xbox One. I was initially a bit concerned about playing such a complicated business simulation on something other than PC, but you quickly get a handle on the controls and it becomes incredibly easy to toggle between various tasks.

Bang for Buck: Is It Worth the Investment?

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Image via Universal and Frontier

The big question with video games, given how expensive they are, is whether they’re worth the investment. With Jurassic World Evolution, I’d say it’s absolutely worth what it costs, although the replay value depends on how you feel about starting from scratch in familiar territory. Just the initial play-through of the entire game would probably take up about 30 hours or so, maybe more or less depending on how meticulous you are. But during that time, the game plays out so differently from island to island that you’re constantly being presented with new and unique challenges that keep the game feeling fresh. Moreover, the sandbox mode is its whole other time investment.

Once you’ve done everything, it’s possible to go back to an island and start over from scratch, with your minimal resources and a blank slate. If you’re the sort that would like to take multiple stabs at building the perfect park, this could ensure the game’s replay value for a long time to come. Moreover, the game offers downloadable content that could keep adding newer unlocks that change how you might want to set up your park.

It’s no coincidence that Frontier Developments is the game developer behind other business simulation games like Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Zoo Tycoon, and Planet Coaster, and they’ve successfully applied the methods learned in those games to the Jurassic World brand in a way that feels organic, challenging, and incredibly fun.

Rating: ★★★★ / ★★★★★

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Image via Universal and Frontier

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