I love dinosaurs. I mean, doesn't every little kid like dinosaurs? I just never stopped loving dinosaurs and really animals in general, and I'm here still loving them. I bet there's one franchise that really put dinosaurs into peoples minds...Jurassic Park.
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Do I even need to say anything? I mean, it's -Jurassic- -park-. THE ultimate science gone wrong, dinosaurs on big screens, lawyers getting eaten movie. But I'm not here to review Jurassic park the film.
No, I'm here to talk about the Jurassic WORLD franchise and movies. Which is....uh...well...okay, I've never seen them. I stopped watching the Jurassic park films after Jurassic park three, which I liked but I was only a teenager at the time, so my opinion now might be quite different.
But as far as I can tell from what little I've seen and know about them, they're basically the original Jurassic Park film done over again, but worse. I mean, the movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, ends with several hundred dinosaurs escaping into the world, and Malcolm from the original Jurassic Park just...showing up at the US senate saying it's a 'Neo-Jurassic' period now as dinosaurs now live with man kind.
Do I really need to point out the flaws in that? I do? Do I have to? Damn it...fine. One, all dinosaurs were female in the original film, right? Sure, they got around that, but in the book at least, the 'disaster' of Jurassic Park was caused because everything that could go wrong, even if it was a less then one percent change of going wrong, went wrong at precisely the right time to make the disaster work. In Jurassic World did they just...let all the dinosaurs breed whatever? That seems like an incredibly dumb thing to do. Two: The dinosaurs were made up of all separate species, so, the chances of a dinosaur even finding fellow dino of the same species are low. three: They're all in a very small area, just, I don't know, bomb the area if your panicking about dinosaurs surviving in modern day. And don't get me started on diseases affecting them, along with the whole lack of wilderness to survive on!
...Anyway! I think that says a lot about my opinion about later Jurassic Park films. Despite this, way back in or after 2003 I played the game Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, which is a park builder where you remake Jurassic park. I loved it, and though I own the disc still, I am unsure if it will run on windows 10. But in 2018, another game came out, Jurassic World: Evolution. And you better believe I bought that up as soon as possible.
Taking place after the Original Jurassic World, but before Fallen Kingdom, you are tasked with building dinosaur parks across the Five Deaths, a fictional island chain in Costa Rico, or, off the coast of the country, rather.
There are three major DLCS that add new gameplay to the game, and more that just add new dinosaurs, but, I don't own any of the DLC, so I will just talk about the base game.
The base campaign starts off with Ian Malcolm complaining about life, you, and dinosaurs. I'm not sure why Jeff Goldblum is here, but the character of Malcolm seems to be here just to tell you this is an incredibly bad idea. The campaign is divided into five or six island locations to build parks in. The reason it's five or six is because one was originally the only sandbox island you could play without worrying about money, but a later update made it so once you reached 4 stars out of five with any island you unlocked sandbox mode for that island.
Frontier, the game developers behind this game, apparently had 100 or so developers working on this game. That does not seem like much, but I fully admit to not knowing how many people normally work on video games. They also released updates after the games release, adding the above mentioned sandbox modes, challenge modes to reach 5 stars in the shortest amount of time, and other features.
I won't hide the fact that I admire and like Frontier, they make good games that allow a lot of sandbox creativity and freedom. Unfortunately this is not one of them.
let's talk about the dinosaurs first. You start off with one viable genome of a dino, and can send expedition teams to fossil sites to get more fossils to get more DNA so that one that's at or above 50% genome can be made into a living creature. Annoyingly, you don't know what the creatures habits are aside from meat or plant eating until you make the first dino, so it's entirely possible to put in a forest loving dino with one that hates forests.
The dinosaur stats are put into 2 categories, health and comfort. Health is put into thirst and hunger, self explanatory. Comfort is more complex, divided into wetlands, grasslands, forests, population, and social need. Wetlands means how much water is in the exhibit, grasslands is how much space -total- is in the exhibit, forests is how many trees there are, and social is how many animals of the same kind there are, and population is how many animals there are total.
While it sounds confusing, it's actually too simple. There's no difference in most dinosaurs aside form some like forests, some like open fields, some need to have one or two others of its kind, and some need to be alone. There's no enrichment options, and when the game was released, no option to manually place trees and rocks, though there is now. I fully admit that calling the need for total space, 'grassland' is annoying. And none of this is explained in the games very meager, and split up, tutorial.
Now onto the second most important thing in the game, the guests which...don't technically exist. See, instead of making each guest a entity in the game, with needs and desires and money to spend, instead they focus on each gust building, hotels or viewing stations, needing certain buildings near it, food places, gift shops, restrooms, stuff like that. While I fully admit this is a novel and new way to model guests in park games, I don't like it. So I'm old fashioned.
Another important aspect of the game is the Divisions. They are Entertainment, Science, and Security, and all three want your attention and to be number one in your inbox. For some reason, doing a quest for one Division, means the other two now hate you, and will actually sabotage your park because they're having a temper tantrum. But, leveling up one divisions meter will unlock cool stuff for you, and a special mission that unlocks more cool stuff. There is nothing stopping you from leveling up one Divisions respect in you, then ditching them to get the cool unlocks in another division.
It doesn't make sense that, the Divisions who you write the paychecks for, will sabotage THERE OWN EMPLOYER because...I really have no idea. because they don't feel special, I guess. And this would be a really easy thing to fix, call the divisions investors instead. Everything could work the same way gameplay wise, just change some dialogue. I feel like this was a decision made by Universal rather then Frontier, but I could be very wrong too.
So that's the game. Take care of all way too similar dinosaurs, take care of guests that technically don't exist as individuals, and try to tell the employees that you love them all. Once you finish one island, you move onto the next, unlock more dinos to research and make, and...that's it. One island is very much like the next, and I got bored enough that I stopped played after island number three in the base campaign.
I have to say this was my first Frontier game, and they really dropped the ball on it. I'm not sure why exactly, but I think it was a combination of small team or time frame to make a game, and also Universal making demands on what the game should be like. I hate to say it, but this gets a 1.5 out of 5 stars. I hoped that the free updates would liven the game up for me, but I did not get past even island one when I replayed it recently.
Anyway, that's all for now. See you all, next whenever.
I seriously need to set this to a schedule some time. Oh well, later.
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