Jurassic World: Evolution 3 Review

If there's one thing I've learned from the Jurassic Park movies, it's that running a dinosaur theme park isn't easy. It's a constant balancing act between keeping your staff happy and your park profitable, while also meeting the needs of your guests, whether that means having enough bathrooms or just not getting eaten by a velociraptor. Jurassic World Evolution 3 once again puts you in the role of a park manager, giving you the opportunity to do what the John Hammonds and Simon Maslanis of the world can't do: run a prosperous, lucrative theme park with eye-catching dinosaur attractions and a minimum of violent deaths. With a sophisticated set of management and customization tools, Evolution 3 gives you more control over your park than ever before. The result is an incredibly engaging management sim that's a culmination of an already satisfying series.

Like the previous two games, Jurassic World Evolution 3 has a lot in common with other theme park simulation games. You're responsible for laying roads and electrical infrastructure, building amenities that attract customers, and creating experiences that attract more guests. However, these attractions are not roller coasters and haunted houses, but dinosaurs. Almost any species will win business, but having variety is the key to long-term success – thankfully, you'll have a ton of different dinosaur types to choose from. It's always a little exciting to see these legendary creatures come to life, especially when you unlock the more recognizable species from the movies.

Of course, when you go to Disneyland, it's nearly impossible for Mickey and the princesses to escape the fence and beat up park guests. This adds an extra layer of danger to Evolution 3, and park managers will have to maintain a high safety rating to continue attracting funding. Think of it as a cold, cozy management sim with moments of scares and horror thrown in for good measure. You must keep your dinosaurs happy by meeting their food, environment, and cohabitation needs. Some need room to roam or like to live in groups, while others can thrive in small areas with just a little pasture to nibble on. Carnivores require fresh meat or live prey, while herbivores require green plants, fruits, and nuts. Flying and swimming dinosaurs required special enclosures, because for a pteranodon a fence would have been about as useful as hiding from a T. rex in a bathroom stall. The cycle of going into research dig sites, sending expeditions to those sites, extracting DNA, and finally finding the perfect spot to hatch a newly discovered species is really satisfying.

If this seems like a lot to manage, it is – but the campaign does a good job of walking you through the increasingly complex mechanics. Cabot Finch, who you may remember as head of public relations from previous Jurassic World Evolution games, returns as your guide to visit existing parks under construction around the world and restore them to their original appearance. Paying homage to the original Jurassic Park, the campaign begins in the Montana wasteland and eventually takes you to Las Vegas, Hawaii, and throughout Europe and Asia, adding plenty of variety to the local scenery. Finch is surrounded by a team of scientists and dinosaur experts, but the real star is Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm, who pops up every so often to remind everyone that trying to control nature is bound to lead to disaster.

Even if you're already familiar with the series, campaign mode is a great way to get familiar with Evolution 3's new features. The biggest addition is the introduction of breeding in the park. Previously, you could only synthesize dinosaurs based on the amount of DNA extracted from fossils found on expeditions. Now, once you've synthesized compatible males and females of the same species, you can build a comfortable nesting area and wait for them to get busy.

This mechanic adds some fun new nuances to the tried-and-true Jurassic World Evolution formula. You can work with scientists to develop a breeding program, or better yet, just wait and see if nature has its way. Who knew playing matchmaker for a bunch of prehistoric creatures could be so much fun? Once the next generation hatches, teenagers may have different needs than their parents. For example, adult carnivores prefer to hunt their own prey, while baby raptors and tyrannosaurs need to store prepared meat in enclosures. The tallest dinosaurs could reach the top leaves of trees, but their offspring needed nutrients closer to the ground. If you allow breeding to go unchecked, the enclosure can become overcrowded, leading to guest outbreaks and general panic.

As you manage these dinosaur family units, you'll also have to curry favor with the Entertainment, Security, and Protection factions, another new feature. You gain reputation by completing certain contracts (basically well-paying side missions) and improving the quality of your park. In the final chapters of the story, it becomes very important to gain a positive reputation among all three factions, but they don't necessarily want the same things. Pleasing them becomes another balancing act that adds depth to the game.

The campaign in Jurassic World Evolution 2 feels more like an extended tutorial, but this time around, you have more breathing room to find your own management style. Its target is the backbone of the entire story, in this case a militant group called Extinction Now! Regularly hack into your communications and vandalize your park. As you travel around the world, you'll also need to stop Extinction! 》performance. There are strict guidelines for the first few parks, but once the map opens and you go international, you have a lot of freedom to achieve your goals in any way you see fit.

Part of the fun of a management sim is being able to create something entirely from scratch, which can be done in sandbox mode. This mode has been a staple of Jurassic World Evolution games, and Evolution 3 offers even more customization options. First, you can choose any location from the campaign and generate an island with unique terrain, or use a square map to create a completely flat, barrier-free land.

You can control nearly every aspect of the sandbox, including your starting capital, certain dinosaur behaviors, and more. You can make it more challenging with a limited budget or choose unlimited funds to suit your mood to remove all cost barriers to creating the dinosaur theme park of your dreams. You can earn extra money by signing contracts, but for the most part, the sandbox mode is an unguided experience. It's easy to lose track of time when you're making sure trails are perfectly aligned or arranging an unforgettable trip to the park with maximum dinosaur sightings. Unlike the campaign, where Cabot, Malcolm, and the rest of the cast are constantly chattering at you, Sandbox is quiet and zen-like. Well, at least until the Indominus Raptor escapes.

The third game mode, Scenarios, is my least favorite of the three. These timed challenges can take anywhere from 12 minutes to a few hours and have specific goals and restrictions. In one of the scenarios, you have to manually control a team of rangers and take photos of wild dinosaurs; in the other scenario, you have to manually control a team of your rangers and take photos of wild dinosaurs. In another case, you might be blocked from editing an existing dinosaur enclosure, regardless of whether the people inside are healthy or not. I can't get over this timed trial approach to park management; to me it goes against the zen experience I'm looking for in a simulation game, and the goals aren't interesting enough to be worth the effort. I found myself missing Jurassic World Evolution 2's Chaos Theory mode, which sadly seems to have disappeared.

While I'm personally not a fan of these scenarios, it's impressive that Evolution 3 offers options for fans of nearly every genre of management sim. If you need a story to guide you through the game, this campaign has you covered. If you want to build something completely your own, you can do it in the sandbox. If you really enjoy high-pressure time trials, you may find scene mode more satisfying than I did.

I'm even more impressed with the quality-of-life updates that Evolution 3 brings to the series. With the right infrastructure in place, you can automate maintenance and medical care, eliminating the need to manually track these devices every time a crisis occurs. Aspects that were convoluted or confusing in previous games, such as creating a park tour, are much simpler. There are many more tours available besides the standard jeeps and gyros from the movie; you can arrange a hot air balloon tour or build a Cretaceous cruise that lets guests kayak through rivers and lakes. This time around, improving your transit score by placing monorail stations and tracks throughout the park feels more intuitive. As you expand, you can easily edit existing tracks to expand their coverage, or simply set up an underground Hyperloop to make traveling through the park even easier. Many of the rough edges have been smoothed out.

I encountered some technical issues while playing the game, although most of these have been resolved with patches. Most notably, every time I launched it, the “Continue” and “Load” options were missing from the menu, so every time I wanted to get back to an ongoing activity, I had to start a new game and load it manually from there. This means longer loading screens and the opening voiceover being heard a dozen times, which isn't ideal. Again, thankfully this issue seems to have been resolved, but I also experienced a few crashes when trying to revisit my Indonesian park, which meant going through the same cycle of starting a new game and reloading.

Another downside to playing Evolve 3 before launch was that I couldn't view community creations. Since it has more customization options than its predecessor, it makes sense that players would want to share their creations with the world. It's an interesting idea on paper, but I'm not sure it will work in execution since the player pool is very limited before launch.