Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a management game based on the popular film franchise, where the player must build dinosaur theme parks to entertain guests around the world.
I played both previous games for free on the Epic store, and I’ve seen all the Park/World films.
[h1]Gameplay (medium quality)[/h1]
• Send scientists on expeditions to collect fossils from dig sites around the world, extract DNA from the fossils, then synthesise dinosaurs to put into your park.
• There are dozens of different dinosaurs including herbivores, carnivores, and piscivores, walking on land, swimming in lagoons, and flying in aviaries.
• Each species of dinosaur has different comfort needs including the size of their enclosure, number of animals in the herd, and type of environment such as grass, sand, marshland, or forest, with herbivores requiring different foods such as fruit or nuts.
• While some dinosaurs will be aggressive towards either other and need to be kept separate, some are friendly and can co-exist in the same enclosure, although their environmental needs might still be incompatible.
• The big new feature of JWE3 is naturally breeding baby dinosaurs. This can be fun to begin with, but if the population increases too much, the enclosures get overcrowded and you can’t fulfil the increased environmental needs. I had to remember to delete nests to keep things under control.
• You’ll also need to keep Human visitors happy by building hotels, shops (food, drink, and merchandise), toilets, storm shelters, and provide transportation to distant areas of the park. And of course they’ll need viewing galleries and tours to observe the dinosaurs. I’ve never been a fan of sending jeep tours into the enclosures, so I liked the addition of hot air balloons floating above the park where they won’t disturb the dinos.
• Dinosaurs can get sick, or injured during storms, which requires treatment by a medical team. Storms can also disrupt power to your buildings and fences, giving dinosaurs a chance to break out of their enclosures and attack/eat the guests.
• This wasn’t a big problem for me though, because unlike the managers of Jurassic Park/World in the films, I’m not stupid. I solved every problem they ever had in the films in two simple words: herbivores only. Its always the carnivores who cause the chaos. My parks are completely safe, and I’ve still got iconic dinosaurs like the Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Diplodocus.
• Some campaign mission objectives do force you to get some Velociraptors or T-Rexes, however the only time they really caused a problem was when park rangers enter enclosures to perform status checks (which seems to happen very frequently). But even when a ranger team is destroyed, buying a replacement is cheap.
• The main story features 10 maps, and the campaign structure wants the player to jump from site to site, unlocking new technologies before going back to previous sites to expand. And sometimes you reach a point in the story where you’re prevented from expanding the current park because of tech tree or reputation level restrictions. However, as much as possible I tried to play one map at a time and 5 star it before moving on, so that I could make long term building plans without forgetting the layout of the park.
• The financial part of these games is always really easy. I’m not sure if its even possible to lose money. If you’ve got at least one visible dinosaur, you’ll attract visitors, and if you’ve got at least one shop, you’ll earn a profit. The only “difficulty” is that small profits will slow down your expansion while you save up to pay the costs of building enclosures, sending expeditions, and synthesising dinosaurs. But in every map, by the time I’d got the 5 star rating I had around $30-$40m in the bank while earning a six figure profit per minute.
• I always feel like games in the management genre (JWE, Two Point, etc) are missing something. They’re all designed around building up to a 5 star rating, but as soon as you achieve that, there’s nothing else to do with your fully built park. Just move on to a new map and start the building process all over again. I don’t know what that extra gameplay should be, but I’m not a game designer so its not my job to figure it out. We need some kind of advanced mission objectives that aren’t solved by building more stuff.
[h1]Story (low quality)[/h1]
• Quite basic. There’s a mysterious group who believe that Humans and dinosaurs can’t peacefully co-exist, so they decide to sabotage your parks by disabling power and opening gates. (Seems like the dinosaurs are not the problem here). However, this group was never anything more than a minor inconvenience to me. Remember how I mostly just get herbivores? So yeah, when all the gates were opened, my dinosaurs simply kept chilling in their enclosures, eating plants like it was just another Tuesday.
• There are no cutscenes. Dialogue is provided through radio communication messages during normal gameplay. And while Ian Malcolm (voiced by Jeff Goldblum) does his usual “why is everybody except me an idiot?” thing, none of the other characters are interesting.
[h1]Technical (high quality)[/h1]
• It took me 46 hours to finish the campaign and 5 star all 10 maps.
• I didn’t have any serious framerate issues or stuttering. I noticed some framerate drops on the final campaign map (occasionally down to 30 depending on which direction the camera was facing) but it didn’t significantly affect gameplay.
• In the previous games, with DLSS enabled I regularly saw some ghosting on the movement of dinosaurs or ranger teams, however I don’t recall seeing this at all in JWE3.
• The game is mostly stable as it only crashed for me twice.
• Even when you’ve got thousands of visitors in the park, the viewing galleries appear to have about 5 people inside, instead of the large crowds you’d expect.
[h1]Recommendation[/h1]
Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a good game which fans of the management genre should enjoy, especially if you also like the films. I’d recommend buying on a small sale, mainly because the developers seem to be adding lots of paid DLC.
You don’t need to have played the previous games to enjoy this one. They’re all basically the same but this sequel has more features.
