Jurassic World Evolution 2 review: fixing the past

The dinosaurs should have been left dead.

That’s what I thought to myself, or screamed out loud in my office, during the most difficult moments of Jurassic World Evolution 2. These prehistoric creatures no longer have to be on our land, and I’m not sure I have any right to oppose nature with my well-located pond, guest path, attractions, and loggerhead shop. “Life, uh, finds a way”, as the famous Dr. Ian Malcom said in Jurassic Park. And in Jurassic World Evolution 2, building my dinosaur zoo was like conquering millions of years of history.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is the continuation of the fantastic park simulator of 2018. If you played the dinosaur expansion pack for Zoo tycoon in the past, you know what I’m talking about. But for the uninitiated, Jurassic World Evolution 2 allows you to build your own Jurassic Park (or Jurassic Worlds, if you prefer sequels). It’s a fascinating simulator game – turn fossils into living creatures, keep your workers happy so you don’t get Dennis Nedry’d, and put that t-shirt shop in your favorite spot next to the velociraptors. Though punishing, and perhaps a bit fickle, the game shines by allowing players to take over movie parks and see how they would handle things differently.

Weather Jurassic World Evolution 2The campaign is clunky and mostly feels like a glorified tutorial, the real action of the game is in the new Chaos Theory mode. This mode tasks players with correcting past mistakes. You’re in charge of building Jurassic Park at its location and time period on Spielberg, with no Gyrospheres or other post-90 tech that allow for other game modes. But where park creator John Hammond failed in the movie, you’ll have to succeed. You will get quests, but most of the time you are free to accomplish that goal however you see fit, while designing your park according to your own designs. There are chaos theory modes for each of the five Jurassic Park and World movies, which will take you from Isla Nublar to San Diego and back to Isla Nublar again.

I found Jurassic World Evolution 2 it required a lot of micromanagement to get my park running smoothly. As in the original game, I need to create pens and meet the environmental needs of each dinosaur. If I want two different species of dinosaurs to cohabit in a single pen, I need to do magic to make sure they both get what they need without disturbing each other. I need to heal them when they are sick, take them away when they are dead, create replacement dinosaurs, research new ones, excavate fossils, manage the power grid, place toilets around the park, and it all goes on and on. from there. It can be overwhelming, especially when nature is against you.

If that sounds complex, wait until things start to go wrong. One of the new exhibits in Jurassic World Evolution 2 It’s for aquatic dinosaurs, and I ran into trouble every step of the way while designing my prehistoric aquarium. First, my scientists weren’t smart enough to research an aquatic dinosaur, then they weren’t competent enough to dig up the fossils. So building the dinosaur was too expensive, so I had to sit back and wait for my park to make more money so I could afford this exciting new adventure. When I reached my cash goal, a major storm forced me to evacuate guests and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on repairs.

But these agonizing setbacks made the success even sweeter. When I finally created my perfect lagoon and watched the giant prehistoric shark jump out of the water to eat a modern shark off a hook, I was satisfied. Getting there was unpleasant and frustrating, but the payoff was exactly what I wanted. And my park guests loved it.

That is what Jurassic World Evolution 2 it does so well. Sure, when something goes wrong, everything seems to fall apart, just like in the movies. Unfortunate events seem to happen when you’re the most vulnerable, like when all my original dinosaurs started dying of old age just as I was saving for the Indominus Rex, the park’s star attraction. It can feel like turntables, dragging hordes of families into the park. But the evolution of my park from a two-star park to a five-star one had a purpose. I got to see the hard work, my hard work, in every store and display.

If you don’t want to see your hard work ruined or deal with a checkbook balance, you can always build your park in sandbox mode. But for me, that would ruin what I loved so much about Jurassic World Evolution 2. This game shows why every fictional Jurassic Park has failed since 1993. It’s because these dinosaurs are unreasonable, man. They are difficult to deal with, they are from a completely different age and from what could very well be a different planet. A little mistake, a bad hiring, has destroyed these parks in every movie. And the same can happen to yours, if you’re not careful.

The message of the movies is that you cannot control nature, but Jurassic World Evolution 2 He responds by saying, “We’ll let you try anyway.” And I did it multiple times for almost 20 hours with this park builder. Jurassic World Evolution 2 let me correct the sins of the past by rounding up loose dinosaurs and building one of the most famous movie sets ever. And it allowed me to do it my way and at the same time made me feel like I had succeeded where others failed.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 will be released on November 9 on Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Windows PERSONAL COMPUTER, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a pre-launch download code provided by Frontier. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.