That it’s the campaign and not a creative mode that’s front and centre is quite telling. Evolution promises to let you build your own Jurassic World, but in truth it’s always going to be InGen’s park. And for InGen, there’s only really one way to make a park. While the department heads — representing science, security and entertainment — use missions to seemingly offer up three paths, it’s all illusory. They aren’t separate paths at all, just three lanes you can jump between, all heading in the same direction. There are no real choices, no impetus to specialise.
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It was kind of my fault. The Velociraptor is a pack animal, and without a pack, my first raptor was driven insane. Even a hatchery with no upgrades can produce two dinosaurs at once, so I should have released two of them together. Evolution isn’t forthcoming about these details, however. When you select a dinosaur that you want to generate, some bits of key information are missing, so it’s tricky to prepare for a new exhibit.
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Fine-tuning doesn’t go much beyond placing water and feeders near the platforms, getting dinosaurs closer to their admirers. You’re always going to be building slightly tweaked versions of the same attraction.
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Jurassic World Evolution is the most boring of all possible outcomes for a dinosaur theme park sim. There’s no outlet for creativity and, aside from the prehistoric pals you might make, managing the parks just isn’t a lot of fun. By the time I’d unlocked enough to make the sandbox mode live up to its name, I realised I had nothing left to build.
It’s a greater disappointment because it falls so short of Planet Coaster. Frontier has already made the game that shows Evolution where it went wrong. It’s not that Evolution couldn’t have forged its own path, but it throws away lots of proven systems, often without substituting them for anything else. I don’t want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far.
