Jurassic World Evolution review: Theme park sim, with a side of chaos

BY ADAM ROSENBERG1 DAY AGO

Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm would surely adore a game like Jurassic World Evolution. It's a perfect virtual manifestation of the chaos theory he so worships.

As a video game that you and I can play, Evolution is also a no-brainer proposition. How did it take until 2018 for someone to leap on this idea and execute it well? Take the basic framework of a game like RollerCoaster Tycoon and replace all the rides with dinosaurs.

Basically, build your own Jurassic World. Boom. You can almost hear the money printing itself.

Evolution benefits from the fact that it's the work of Frontier Developments, the studio behind the aforementioned RollerCoaster Tycoon series. Building your very own dino Disney World — a multi-stage operation that involves planning fossil expeditions, researching DNA, egg incubation, recreation activities, and smart facility planning — is magically approachable and satisfying, even when your lab-grown critters don't behave.

And boy oh boy do those dinos misbehave. Even seemingly common-sense decisions, like "never house carnivores and herbivores in the same paddock," come with exceptions. Sure, your meat-loving Ceratosaurus will munch down on smaller Struthiomimus plant-eaters like they're candy, but it won't mess with the towering-yet-peace-loving Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus.

Learning from your (grisly, entertaining) failures is a big piece of what makes Evolution stick so well.

Velociraptors, by contrast, hate pretty much everything. But they especially hate Dilophosauruses, the little, meat-eating venom-spitters that took down Newman (OK fine, Wayne Knight) in the original Jurassic Park. Pair these two dinos together and they will fight for keeps. Always, and probably right away.

Experimentation and learning from your (grisly, entertaining) failures is a big piece of what makes Evolution stick so well. There's very little handholding in this game. No "hey, putting these dinos together is a bad idea!" tips. No hour-long tutorial running through mechanics and core ideas.

The closest you get to any of that is a five-part story mode that hops you from island to island, thrusting you into a variety of situations that all call for different solutions. It's not a tutorial per se, though it does start off easy, with a forgiving, straightforward map and clear explanations of how different bits of your infrastructure work.

Right away, for example, you're shown which buildings matter most for different purposes, and the basic pipeline of dino incubation, which involves sending teams off on fossil expeditions. You learn the importance of roads and power systems. The absolute basics. And after that... good luck! 

As you move from island to island, you're forced to reckon with an array of different challenges: Small parcels of land to wring money out of (showstopper dinos like the T-Rex help), storm-wracked environments (watch out for tropical cyclones!), and, at one point, a bankrupted and deeply in debt park that needs to be torn down and almost completely rebuilt (go SLOW).

IMAGE: FRONTIER DEVELOPMENTS

As you move from place to place (and load old saves or even, in rare cases, restart entire islands), you begin to naturally approach each new park template as a puzzle unto itself. "Missions" assigned by the three main park divisions — Science, Entertainment, and Security — help to steer you in the right direction. But even those require creative solutions, and often become a balancing act.

Consider this example. On my second island, one mission asked me to make a Velociraptor uncomfortable and keep it that way for three uninterrupted minutes. "Comfort" is a stat influenced by everything from the availability of food to the abundance of forest vs. grasslands in an enclosure, and each dino has different needs.

Velociraptors are Evolution's diva dino, so making one unhappy is relatively easy.

Velociraptors are Evolution's diva dino, so making one uncomfortable is relatively easy. But keeping it that way for three minutes? It takes maybe 20 or 30 seconds (if that) for a pissed off Raptor to tear through a fence, at which point it immediately begins chomping on your park guests. Let that happen too many times and you're going to get sued.

I probably could have solved this by building and strategically placing emergency shelters that I would then open to all before conducting my Raptor experiment. In hindsight, I think that's how the game intends for you to deal with the problem. 

That's not how I rolled, though. To keep my Raptor both angry and safely separated from literally anyone or anything it might bite, I put on my mad scientist hat and built a multilayered enclosure, just fences around more fences, with a tiny, Raptor-sized space at the center.

I knew I couldn't stop the angry carnivore, but maybe I could slow it down long enough to fulfill my mission objective without it actually breaking free. 

I might have broken the game a little here, as the Raptor I eventually airlifted into the middle of that enclosure just kind of sat there, unmoving. I like to think its little virtual brain was overwhelmed to the point of total paralysis.

IMAGE: SCREENSHOT BY ADAM ROSENBERG

IMAGE: SCREENSHOT BY ADAM ROSENBERG

While that strategy did work — three minutes later, I got a "mission complete" notification and tore the whole setup down (the Raptor was fine) — I spent so much time focused on figuring out how to manage an angry Raptor that I lost track of my park divisions. When you do too many missions in a row for one division, your standing with the other two starts to slide. Let it go too low and you're at risk of sabotage. 

That's exactly what happened. Moments after I freed my Raptor specimen from her seven cages, some Entertainment pissant futzed with the power systems and the gates to all my dino enclosures suddenly opened. Chaos ensued, but it was a magical kind of chaos as I tried to contain the problem with hastily constructed fence blockades and the generous application of tranquilizer darts. 

This is a game that's very good at making you feel fine with failure. Sometimes, sure, you'll have to reload to an earlier moment — save manually, and often, as the game's autosave is... unforgiving — but most of the time you can pick up the pieces and keep chugging along.

Really, that's part of the fun. Jurassic World Evolution is a game of spinning plates. Just when you recover from one near-fumble, three others spring up. You're constantly working to keep all of these vital, often at-odds forces in a stable equilibrium. Even the slightest issue can make everything go haywire.

IMAGE: FRONTIER DEVELOPMENTS

In the end, that's why this game works so well. Jurassic Park the movie isn't telling the story of a perfectly maintained dinosaur theme park; it's great because it captures the unimaginable chaos of what would happen if such a place really existed, and then things went wrong.

When you strip everything away and consider the core experience, each island you visit, each park you build, is its own Jurassic Park story waiting to happen. Jurassic World Evolutionworks so well because it's built in a way that allows those moments to occur organically, forcing you to contend again and again with this constant push-and-pull between stability and chaos.