JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION 2 Review
Jurassic World Evolution 2 lets you build the dinosaur park of your dreams. It offers many different modes of play that have a few unique variations, but if you play too many in a row it all starts to feel exactly the same.
The campaign of this game has an interesting story to play, but it isn’t different enough between each level to maintain interest. Instead of starting completely from scratch each round, I would rather have later levels already have some of the early game stuff built so it doesn’t feel like trudging through the exact same thing over and over. It is nice in that it teaches you little by little how to play the game, but once you’ve gotten a concept it would be nice to be able to move on from it. I did appreciate that most of the voice work was done by the actual actors from the movie like Jeff Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard. Though ironically Chris Pratt did not return to voice his character, I guess Chris Pratt will voice anyone except for Chris Pratt.
The Chaos Theory mode offers some of the more diverse playing experiences, but still boils down to doing the same thing. But at least with this mode you have the skins for the various movies, so it’s fun to recreate what happened but without the dinosaurs going on killing sprees. Just make sure you watch your money or it will quickly be gone before your park is viable and you’ll need to start over.
Challenge mode is a lot like the others but you have a time limit to get your park up to 5 stars. I would recommend playing at least a few campaign levels before attempting this one, or maybe just the Jurassic Park Chaos Theory level, just to get a sense of what you will need to get your park a high rating before jumping into a time crunch.
My favorite mode has to be the Sandbox though. Unlimited time, unlimited budget, just go crazy and build the park you want. You’ll need to play through the other modes to unlock various buildings and dinosaurs in this one, but after playing the more constricting modes this one was a breath of fresh air. I did run into an issue where building a large power plant without building the smaller ones to connect it to froze up my game, so just be aware of that.
One major point of frustration for me was setting up the tracks for the park tour ride. Maybe I just couldn’t figure it out, but it was impossible to predict if it would give you a straight path or a curved one which made it difficult to have it nicely go around the enclosures. The tracks also can’t cross over pathways, which wouldn’t be a big deal except everything needs to be connected to a path, your viewing areas of the enclosures and hatcheries would get cut off easily so you need to plan carefully. It’s not impossible to work with, but it can get rather annoying.
Visually this game is really nice to look at. The dinosaurs all look really good when zoomed in and even have fun animations like throwing around a goat before eating it. My only complaint is that while in building mode you can’t zoom out enough to see your whole building area, so planning enclosures can get a little tricky.
Overall I enjoyed this game once I got the hang of it. There’s tons to build and a lot of dinosaurs to create so it will keep you busy for a while. One of the funniest moments to me was in Chaos Theory mode I had some velociraptors escape their cages, but obviously there was no voice work done should that happen, so John Hammond just kept right on with asking me to do stuff for the park while there were raptors running around, it felt like maybe he should have been a little more concerned? It made for a pretty funny little moment though. There is a ton of customization for your dinosaurs that I barely scratched the surface of, I just wish there was a little more variation of game play in the various modes. I give this game a 7/10.
