Jurassic World Evolution

PC, PS4, XO | $99.95 | WWW. JURASSICWORLDEVOLUTION.COM What happens if you mix Planet Coaster’s DNA with that of a best-selling dinosaur franchise?

Jeff Goldblum appears in the top-right of the screen and mutters some twaddle about chaos. Chaos? Ha! There’s no chaos here. Our park is running like clockwork, visitor numbers are up, there are six dinosaurs on display, there’s a fast-food joint and a clothes shop boosting our rating and… Oh dear, what’s that thumping sound? Ten minutes later the last transport helicopter lands and we finally close the emergency shelters, having seen our profits plunge and our guests drop like flies.

Frontier’s game takes the thrills of management and adds the very real possibility of your exhibits getting loose and killing people. And they’ll get free: the game makes sure of it, despite all your planning and fence-building.

Your parks are scattered across the ‘Five Deaths’ archipelago familiar from Crichton’s novels. Only one of them is a true sandbox, and this needs to be unlocked by getting a four-star rating on the starting island.

The game is obsessed with profit. Luckily, dinosaurs are what the public pays to see, and dinosaurs are what you’ve got. Frontier has chosen to be scientifically accurate by not including aquatic or flying reptiles. There’s a decent selection, big and small, herbivore and carnivore, that need to be housed in paddocks surrounded by fences, with a gate for rangers to enter, water, a food source, and a way for visitors to see them.

Your prehistoric pets have two ratings: health, which is self explanatory, and comfort, which depends on how well their social environmental and gastronomic needs are met. A drop in the comfort rating generally leads to thoughts of escape, leading to a fencing breach and a short rampage around the park before being taken down by a tranquiliser dart and airlifted back into the appropriate enclosure while rangers repair the fence.

The helicopters and rangers are the workforce of a park, and while you can leave them on automatic, it’s more efficient to fill a seat on the chopper or jeep and take the medicating or tranquilising shot yourself. Doing this takes you away from your management duties, of course, so there’s a balance to be struck.

Jurassic World Evolution could be a sequel to Frontier’s 2016 rollercoaster manager – the type of sequel that has slightly fewer features. It tries to hide this behind dinosaurs and famous faces, and it’s largely successful in the short term because dinosaurs are awesome and Jeff Goldblum has more charisma as a distorted thumbnail than a whole army of Chris Pratts. By reskinning Planet Coaster, Frontier has taken a proven structure and stretched a best-selling covering over it. Most of the game is a tutorial for the sandbox island, and the slow pace of progression leaves you feeling like the training wheels are on for much too long. Ian Evenden