Publisher:Frontier DevelopmentsDeveloper:Frontier DevelopmentsPlatforms:PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft WindowsGenre:Economic SimulationRelease date:June 2018
I remember buying Dinozorlar magazine as a child and collecting the pieces of its glow-in-the-dark T. rex model. People of my generation will remember it too. That magazine, which I bought so eagerly, took my curiosity and admiration for dinosaurs—the dominant creatures on the planet before humans—to new heights. I tried to memorise their long, complicated Latin names and read about their characteristics with great care.
Since those years, the Jurassic Park legend has reached its fifth cinema outing. The painstakingly built dinosaurs of the first film, wonders of mechanics and practical effects, have been replaced by digital copies created with CGI and green screens. The scripts have increasingly given way to action-heavy, complicated and fantastical plots. Of course, as with many series, the first Jurassic Park probably still holds a special place in many of your hearts: our first encounter with those dinosaurs on television, demonstrating Steven Spielberg’s genius.
From the first days of the film’s popularity, its makers brought magazines, comics and games to young dinosaur lovers. The older Jurassic Park games used much the same principle as the newly released Jurassic World Evolution I am about to introduce: breed dinosaurs in a park and increase its income. A few action games also appeared outside this concept, of course. Those were simple slash-and-kill affairs in which you killed every dinosaur in your path.
The latest fruit of Jurassic Park’s accelerating visual progress in cinema and games is Jurassic World Evolution. It lets you see, observe and manage dinosaurs recreated digitally in detail. It is an economic simulation, or a tycoon game, if you like. Its content, locations and people are designed around the Jurassic Park films. As you achieve things, you unlock database entries showing characters’ names and a still recalling them, even if their faces aren’t recreated in the game. These explain which film the character appeared in and where. Dinosaurs and locations have similar entries, detailing a place’s history and its appearances in the films. I should also mention that the game has no Turkish language support.
The gameplay follows a fairly simple formula. The developers have designed it more as a visual simulation than a test of competition and difficulty. You run a park, but going bust is almost impossible. Even a handful of dinosaurs quickly starts bringing in money, and making a loss or going bankrupt is very, very difficult. Expect park management focused more on enjoyment than competition.
Jurassic World Evolution offers islands of different sizes on which to build. Each unlocks automatically when you reach a certain rating, profitability and park quality on the previous island. You can then travel between them. Money doesn’t transfer, however, so you start again on each new island. That may be a little challenging initially, but you’ll soon overcome it. Three departments accompany you from the first island: Science, Entertainment and Security. Each wants you to run the park according to its agenda. The Security head, for example, asks you to make particular dinosaurs fight, or even release aggressive species among the visitors, supposedly to identify and fix weaknesses in security. Science wants new species discovered and a park full of different dinosaurs. Entertainment can give tasks concerning the adequacy of food, drink and leisure buildings for guests. These divisions aren’t rigid: Science sometimes asks for tasks similar to the others. Completing departmental work improves your relationships and unlocks new dinosaurs, building upgrades and additional building types.
On every map, you need to complete departmental tasks and strengthen those relationships to unlock all the dinosaurs, upgrades and buildings. You can progress without doing so, but then only the maps unlock; you won’t gain access to everything else. After unlocking all the islands, you gain an island where you can build with unlimited money. It’s a place to enjoy the sandbox freely. Without money worries, you can also adjust settings for weather, indestructible buildings and automatically replenished feeders, automating many of your usual tasks.
Now for the details. You run a dinosaur park—that much is clear. To attract guests and start earning money, you breed a dinosaur in a laboratory once you have enough DNA, then release it into an area enclosed by security fencing. Visitors begin arriving. Each dinosaur has an appeal rating, which affects visitor numbers. Small herbivores have low ratings; enormous herbivores and carnivores have much higher ones. These ratings also determine the park’s average dinosaur quality. The better the quality, the more visitors arrive. Unfortunately, the buildable areas are small and quite restricted. You won’t be able to build a huge park or keep every species together; you’ll need different combinations on different islands. I couldn’t understand why the islands were made so small. The poor use of available space was one of the criticisms of the game.Another weakness I noticed is that the developers haven’t given each dinosaur its own behavioural character. Raptors, Dilophosaurus and Deinonychus, for example, react and behave the same way inside the park. Rather than individually characterising each species, it appears they have copied the same behaviours across certain groups with common ancestry. For a game centred on observing dinosaurs closely, I consider that a major omission.
The game doesn’t give you every building and upgrade immediately. You unlock them through playing and completing departmental tasks. Make sure you try to do those tasks: if you focus only on managing the park, many buildings and upgrades will remain locked even when you reach the end. Having now finished all the islands, I still have at least four or five dinosaurs I haven’t discovered.
Alongside managing the park, you send teams to dig sites around the world to collect fossils and DNA for new dinosaurs. These aren’t imaginary locations: all are real sites where remains of those species have been found. The database even explains when a site was discovered and by whom. Working on the material from these expeditions reveals a percentage of a dinosaur’s DNA. At 50%, you know enough to breed it. Besides its original DNA, you can add DNA from other reptiles and animals to increase disease resistance, attack, defence or lifespan. Additional work in the research section makes this possible, producing stronger, longer-lived or tougher dinosaurs. You can also change their colours by researching palettes. These additions increase a dinosaur’s rating but lower the proportion of original DNA, creating a risk of incubation failure. The hatchery displays this as a percentage. A dinosaur whose DNA you have recovered to 100% is less likely to fail when modifications are added. That’s why fully completing each dinosaur’s genome through excavations is very useful.
We’ve covered breeding and obtaining DNA. Now, where should you put the dinosaurs? They have particular expectations of their habitat. Meet them and you won’t have problems, apart from occasional illness that the jeep-driving Rangers can quickly handle. Depending on the species, dinosaurs prefer groups or solitary lives. All of these details appear on the breeding screen, which I recommend checking before you produce one.Herbivores can generally live in groups of two or four alongside other herbivores. Some, such as the large armoured ones we call tanks, dislike crowds and become uncomfortable in busy enclosures. In those cases, the Comfort values on the dinosaur’s information panel begin dropping. This panel represents its wellbeing. The values have blue and red sections; when they reach the red, the dinosaur becomes angry and tries to escape.Red marks the limit, so pay attention. Your first consideration when breeding is how large a group the dinosaur likes. Some herbivores cannot be happy with fewer than four of their own kind, so you need at least four. Others like living alone and become angry if you produce too many. Once you have the numbers right, consider enclosure size. The larger the dinosaur, the more space it needs. This isn’t just a matter of square metres: the enclosure also needs woodland for shelter and grassland for grazing, depending on the species. Without enough forest, a woodland-dependent dinosaur’s comfort drops until it becomes stressed, attacks the fence and escapes. It may sound complicated and difficult, but believe me, once you understand it, it becomes very simple in practice.
Because herbivores don’t fight among themselves, you can keep as many as 10–15 different species in a suitable enclosure. Carnivores are different. You must choose between species or divide the park. You can’t keep them with herbivores, because they constantly attack and kill them. Competition also prevents you from keeping different carnivore species together. The alternative is to house small carnivores with one large carnivore. The smaller ones may challenge the larger one but hesitate to fight it, so they can coexist. You cannot, however, put different small carnivores, such as Velociraptors and Dilophosaurus, in the same enclosure: they will soon kill each other. Nor can you house a T. rex with another large carnivore such as Spinosaurus. They will constantly fight, leaving you to keep delivering medicine and restoring the injured animals’ health. Forget, and one will certainly kill the other in their next fight, causing a major financial loss. Breeding a well-developed large carnivore costs millions of dollars. Unlike herbivores, large carnivores aren’t social and don’t like groups, so putting two T. rexes in one enclosure brings no benefit: they will see each other as rivals and kill one another. One large carnivore and a group of one small carnivore species will suffice per enclosure. Small carnivores are social and become unhappy alone, immediately attacking the fence. If you’re making raptors, you need at least four in the same enclosure.
You’ve bred the right number of dinosaurs for their social needs, given them enough space and released them into the park. Guests will start arriving. Next, place the appropriate feeders in each enclosure. There are four types. The one you’ll use most serves low-feeding herbivores. Another, the tall herbivore feeder, serves enormous animals such as Brachiosaurus. Carnivores also have two options: prepared pieces of meat, or live goats to satisfy their hunting instincts. Once these are in place, you need only watch for illness and take precautions against bad weather. Of course, as visitors increase, you must also meet their food, drink, accommodation and entertainment needs with buildings near the paths they use. These provide extra income and improve guest satisfaction, raising your park’s quality. Every building consumes electricity, so make sure you have enough power stations. Outages give carnivores waiting to attack the fences an excellent opportunity to escape.
Does it end there? No. Some islands have harsh weather and tornadoes. You erect defence towers against them, but they don’t help: the tornado hits the park anyway, destroying and breaking buildings along its path. Use the Ranger station for repairs. Its jeeps handle repairs, treatment and many other tasks. You can also take direct control of a jeep and drive around the park from a first-person perspective, even aiming the medical rifle yourself to heal dinosaurs. There is also a building called the ACU. You can control its helicopter directly or click to assign tasks. The ACU helicopter is used to tranquilise escaped dinosaurs and arrange their transport. Dinosaurs that need moving must first be shot with a tranquiliser. Dead dinosaurs must also be removed, because they spread disease.
I hope this piece has answered the questions on your mind.
Now for the game’s positives (+) and negatives (-).The Positives (+)
+ At present, this is the most detailed way to see digital dinosaur models. If you have young children interested in these creatures that lived millions of years ago, it can be an entertaining introduction to their appearance and, to a limited extent, behaviour.
+ The game has a small installation size and performs quite satisfactorily on weaker computers.
+ Fans of the Jurassic Park series can learn plenty of information in English*: characters, locations, history, dig sites and more.
The Negatives (-)
– The game is sold onSteamfor around TRY 214.00 outside sales. That is a very, very high price for what it offers. I put it down to expensive Jurassic Park licensing fees.
– Playtime is quite short for the price. It doesn’t offer a detailed management experience, with almost no competition or difficulty. It seems intended more as something for younger players to watch dinosaurs and enjoy themselves.
– Probably to avoid a higher age rating, many gore effects have been omitted. Given the game’s already suitable structure, this makes it feel even more like a ‘toy’. Dinosaurs attack and eat people and kill one another, yet you never see a drop of blood or dismemberment. They could at least have made it an optional setting.
– The areas provided for building parks are small and restrictive. Sometimes finding a suitable place for a single building is a struggle. Sloping terrain can prevent construction even in an otherwise empty, suitable-looking area.
– The game has no developed story. You play in something like a sandbox from the start, which makes boredom set in fairly quickly.