Jurassic World: Evolution

Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now

PC, PS4, Xbox One

This should be a sure thing: a marriage of the enduring park-sim formula to the most vibrant theme park in pop culture. Jurassic World: Evolution promises to let you create your own dinosaur enterprise spanning several Costa Rican islands, a process that sees you laying out enclosures, entertaining guests and dealing with inevitable disaster as sabotage and tropical storms set your star attractions free.

It delivers a strong first impression, too. Frontier’s dinosaurs are detailed, characterful and well-animated, and there is something immediately appealing about these lush islands and the clean, high-tech buildings with which you populate them. Each new dinosaur is introduced with a cinematic camera pan and a movieaccurate roar, and cultivating enclosures that meet each creature’s needs, from topography and foliage to food and optimal social groups, presents an absorbing challenge at first. There are a few early hiccups – lengthy waits while you earn enough cash for your next key building, or the repetitive chore of sending crews out on fossil hunts – but the fantasy holds, and there’s satisfaction in laying out your first park just so. Unfortunately, Evolution’s flaws begin to emerge as soon as wonder gives way to serious engagement with the game’s underlying management systems.

In addition to building a functional and profitable park within the narrow confines of each island, you must also complete contracts on behalf of your entertainment, science and security divisions. Building your reputation with each leads to specific rewards, while neglecting them might result in saboteurs cutting the power at a key moment. There are critical-path missions, too, which impose success conditions that curtail your creative freedom and are frequently tedious – the first warning signs of the game’s downturn.

The issue with the contract system is that there’s no real logic underpinning its demands or consequences. The science division might ask you to go ten minutes without a dinosaur attack, for example, but successfully completing this challenge effectively tanks your reputation with the security team. Security might then ask you to build a hotel, only for this to result in the entertainment division – whose principle concern is for the park’s tourists – rising up in revolt and poisoning your triceratops. These strange emerging situations can be entertaining, but their bizarre logic takes you out of the fantasy of running a park.

This extends to the minutiae of the game, too. The fantasy of organising a dinosaur park is quickly subsumed by the chore of running a business whose every operation requires your direct input – from refilling feeders to rebooting gates to incrementing the cost of a burger for maximum profit. Satisfaction in simulations comes from setting up functioning processes: Evolution matures into something like a clicker game, where a lack of automation forces you into busywork in order to distract from a lack of depth.

Evolution’s superficially rich systems undermine one another. It’s possible to invest in more secure fences for your dinosaur enclosures, for example, but this doesn’t really matter because a deinonychus can and will headbutt its way through the thickest walls if its food or social needs aren’t met. Park management should be about trade-offs and compromise, but Evolution’s thin simulation effectively reduces a broad spectrum of options down to a handful of absolute necessities. There’s also a profound disconnect between the degree of depth granted to your park’s dinosaur occupants and its human visitors. Dinosaurs exhibit a relatively small set of behaviours, but they have individual needs and face individual dangers. Individual guests, however, don’t express any personal preferences, and don’t even really seem to react to the dinosaurs, except in the canned animations that play when they get eaten. This is a step backwards for the management genre, which has been successfully simulating individual theme park visitors for decades.

It can lead to some truly bizarre situations, too. On more than one occasion we encounter scenarios where park visitors flee into dinosaur enclosures and refuse to leave, even with the gates left open. This results in a persistent ‘dinosaur threat’ alert even with the rest of the park secured, and the only way to resolve it is to wait for the guests to get eaten: the cost of the ensuing lawsuits isn’t prohibitive, and our safety rating reliably returns to green as soon as the threat is ‘resolved’.

Dispatching ranger teams to repair a wall or reboot a power station in the midst of a dinosaur crisis is a big part of that fantasy, and Evolution’s implementation is initially promising: you can set task lists for your rangers and issue upgrades, and even take control and drive around your park yourself. The fun fades, however, when you discover that ranger teams are effectively invulnerable: a T-rex might chase after a jeep in the manner of the first movie, but it’s programmed to never actually catch it. At this point, cautious micromanagement gives way to outright manipulation of Evolution’s undercooked fundamentals. That, unfortunately, is the story of the game as a whole.

It is testament to the high standard of presentation that Evolution survives these issues for as long as it does. Collecting and building enclosures for dinosaurs remains fun simply because they look and sound great, but this is the shallow kind of fun that borders on compulsion, and a far cry from the game’s potential. Evolution’s successes entertain your mind’s-eye view of what running a dinosaur theme park might be like, but its failures encourage you to imagine the better game that could be made with this premise.

Cultivating enclosures that meet each creature’s needs presents an absorbing challenge at first