Come dino with me
Jurassic World Evolution 2 (PEGI 16) PS4, PS5, XBOX ONE, XBOX X/S, PC ★★★★✩
LET’S face it, with the quality of the last few Jurassic Park movies, you have to wonder if they should have gone the way of the dinosaurs a long time ago.
That being said, if they had then we’d have been denied the pleasure of the Jurassic World games.
I’ve always enjoyed ‘business management’ titles, from the moment I got my mitts on Theme Park and set about crafting the venue of my dreams. And if, like me, you spent much of the last Jurassic World movie internally dialoguing about how you could have done a much better job at running things, now is your chance to put your money where your mouth is.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 builds on the sterling work of its 2018 predecessor, which saw you creating a dino theme park on a remote chain of islands.
Unlike the first Evolution however, in this game your aim is to construct sanctuaries to house prehistoric animals that have escaped into the wild from the ruins of the Jurassic World park.
While Evolution felt a little slow to get started, Evolution 2 makes building enclosures quick and more enjoyable thanks to some
smart quality-of-life shortcuts.
Guided by helpful pop-ups as you make tentative steps into the dinosaur sanctuary business, you are first given basic fencing supplies to wrangle your prehistoric nomads into temporary pens.
It also helps that you get briefed on individual species’ needs right off the bat, so you can start to make informed decisions about where to build their enclosures, and what other dinos they may be comfortable sharing that area with.
While some creatures want leafy forests with trees they can spend all day grazing on, others want a more arid home and a significantly meatier diet.
Graphically it’s beautiful, with rich and stunningly realised environments that feel vibrant and teeming with life.
The dinosaurs themselves are also wonderfully rendered, packed with details that make them feel almost tangible. There’s an impressive number of beasts to meet and greet, with 75 different species all needing to be rehomed, this time including sea dwelling creatures and flying reptiles that need room to spread their wings.
It goes without saying that no Jurassic Park game would be complete without the golden tones of Jeff Goldblum, and it’s his character – Dr Ian Malcolm – that introduces players to the game.
As ever, Dr Malcolm’s warnings are brushed aside, and you find yourself back in the ‘incapable’ hands of Cabot Finch – who was a marketing manager in the first game, but is now assistant head of the US Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The game’s Challenge Mode boasts four difficulty levels, which each offer their own set of bespoke obstacles to overcome, while in Sandbox mode players get absolute free rein to build with unlimited cash, and the ability to modify dinosaur behaviours, and even control the weather.
Where things get really fun though is the new Chaos Theory mode, which lets you experience key moments from the movies – essentially allowing you to play out ‘what if?’ scenarios. For instance you can go back to the very first Jurassic Park built by John Hammond, to see if under your management, it wouldn’t have ended in disaster.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 is a solid sequel that takes everything fun about the first game and improves on it – and it’s not often you can say that.
And while Campaign mode feels more like a walkthrough than an actual game, the superb Chaos Theory is the reason I still hear the Jurassic Park theme in my head when I close my eyes at night.
Buy it: £41.99 from cdkeys.com