A BLEND OF TOP-CLASS MANAGEMENT SIM TINKERING AND DINO-RAMPAGING ACTION, JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION FINDS A WAY
It’s the ultimate fantasy about the ultimate fantasy – a park simulation videogame, actually done well, based on the world created by late author Michael Crichton. Jurassic World Evolution – named for the recent Pratt turn in the franchise, but owing more than its fair share to the original Park and its sequels – feels like such a perfect marriage, it’s difficult to imagine what could really go wrong with it. Maybe it will have been rushed in order to release at the same time as the upcoming movie, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Maybe it will rely too much on its celebrity appearances, like the glorious Jeff Goldblum reprising his role as Dr Ian Malcolm. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But from some time with Jurassic World Evolution, plenty more with Frontier’s previous park management title Planet Coaster, and with the knowledge of just how many games the studio has made over the past couple of decades featuring parks, animals, or a mix of the two, it’s difficult to see the ‘maybes’ having any real legs. Of course, this might all be a result of the intoxication that washes over a person when they are smack bang in the middle of the ultimate fantasy about the ultimate fantasy. Time will tell. For now, it’s all about what Evolution might bring us, what we’ve seen of it so far, and how much Evolution manages to be its own thing in the face of the accusations that will do the rounds this is merely a Planet Coaster re-skin.
Michael Brookes, game director on Jurassic World Evolution, acknowledges Frontier’s last game had a big impact on the new one with the terrible lizards: “Obviously [Universal] said they’d seen what we’d done with Planet Coaster and various other things, so they knew that we could do a management style game,” he says, “However, we very much wanted to not do a re-skin of Planet Coaster. We think with Jurassic World there’s an opportunity there to go deeper with the management. You’ve got [to think about] much more with the dinosaurs, the effects of dinosaurs, things like that, so they had to be stars of the show, not the creative tool. Even though Planet Coaster is a management game, it’s also this really amazing creative tool, so we wanted to kind of divorce the two and make sure that with Jurassic World we focused on actually looking after your dinosaurs and the impact of what looking after the dinosaurs means.”
From the outset it’s clear the dinosaurs do matter a good deal more than you might possibly expect. Starting out on the relatively calm island of Matanceros – first mentioned in the Lost World novel – players get used to the systems being thrown their way in a relatively calm, straightforward fashion. Place an enclosure, attach a complex in which you can breed new once-dead creatures, don’t forget to power it all up, build your
