So, where do I begin?
I believe I will begin with evaluating what was delivered in contrast of what was publicized. I remember when the gameplay demo was shown the first time, we all had that exquisite rush of excitement as we do now after watching the planet zoo gameplay.
We were shown just a couple of Brachiosaurus, a ceratosaurus and a triceratops ( in that order ), but we felt overwhelmed and just stood in awe, we dared to fantasize about the other possible species, and we felt hyper exited when that dinosaur we were hoping to get was shown in a species profile. Such experience was worth all the money we had, 44.99$ for regular and 49.99$ for deluxe to be exact.
Now to the actual review, the devs kept telling us that they wished to make the most realistic and graphically beatific dinosaurs ever seen in a video game, and no one can deny that they delivered what was promised and to that I salute them ! The game is so gorgeous and the dinosaurs are a majestic sight to behold.
They also told us that we will be able to drive the 4x4 jeeps, or the ACU helicopter, it was pretty amazing as well, maybe we wanted to do more with them ( retire/kill dinosaurs, rescue guests… ), but that remains to be seen in the future.
There was a moment when the two Brachiosaurus were going to clip into each other, but they cleverly moved the camera away, so basically they didn’t do anything wrong on that matter, that definitely wasn’t false advertising, the velociraptors pack hunting the triceratops in the trailer was.
Please don’t get me wrong, I am not here to drag the good name of Frontier to the ground, I am just making an honest assessment of the game. After release, we all got that adrenaline rush to play the game and unlock everything ( I finished the campaign in around 3 days ), as we advance through the campaign we were both amazed and disappointed. I loved seeing my ceratosaurus fight and kill a triceratops in a well made Jurassic World style animation, I hated it though when the Struthiomimus just stood in its place and waited for the Ceratosaurus to come and kill it ( the same goes for goats and humans ). I loved looking at the park when the rain was falling, everything was aesthetically perfected with cool wet effects on dinosaurs and buildings, I hated that the guests weren’t real ( as the individual dinosaurs are ), and the management side of the game was very limited. I can go on making a best seller book of things I liked and others I disliked, the point is already made clear.
Now, let’s talk about the major updates, I am not going to talk about the fallen kingdom update since it already kind of belongs with the original game. The first free major update I guess was the one that introduced challenge mode and fixed some heavily requested dinosaur size changes, it just showed the devs actually cared and are very smart to not quickly present a paid dlc, and I loved that ! Later would come the first paid dlc, the secrets of Dr. Wu. I personally didn’t pay for it, I was going to buy it later, but I happened to win it in a gleam giveaway, which proves that Frontier’s giveaways are legit and not just hoaxes. So, the dlc … I believe it added some pretty useful mechanics to the game, where we get to mess around much more with genetics, a little bit of extra story, around 8/10 hours of gameplay, it had 5 dinosaurs, with only the Troodon and Spinoraptor being interesting, the other three not so much being remodels of existing ones, using the same animations. Was it worth it? I believe so, if you want a couple of T-rex to coexist getting this dlc is a must, but for goodness’ sake rework some aspects of it to encourage people, just rework the Ankylodocus, it is actually useless.
Now comes the second paid dlc ( which I paid for by the way ), the cretaceous pack brought three new dinosaurs, and the star of the show was obviously the Iguanodon, why? Simply because it feels as a new dinosaur, with new animations, a different model, and it can fight back small and medium carnivores! That was like a dream come through for most of the fan base, the Carcharodontosaurus was welcome sight, the dreadnoughtus was definitely not, I mean I don’t need a taller/uglier Ankylodocus that have bad social/population requirements to tell me I didn’t put it in an enclosure with enough grassland, but anyways that was 2 good dinos and one not so good, it seems fair I guess. There were a couple of free updates, I don’t remember all of them, but I want to thank the guys at Frontier for their hard work, and please don’t hate me if I say something wasn’t totally good, I just want to provide my honest and respectful opinion about it. For the current fee, I believe this dlc is a little bit overpriced, it is not a big deal but I think it should cost 40% less.
The third dlc brought three carnivores, I loved the Proceratosaurus and the Herrerasaurus, but I hated how the Acrocanthosaurus looked from those preview pictures, I felt totally upset that it was unrecognisable from the JPOG variant, so I decided to not buy this dlc, but then I kept watching videos about it showing the the REAL Acro ( the preview picture should be changed, the Acro in it looks like it is having an allergic reaction whilst being on steroids ), so I bought the dlc, and was surprised of the amount of content that it provided, each dinosaur had multiple animations, and the Acrocanthosaurus as you would have guessed turned out to be my favorite of all of them, that preview pictures on the online shop does it no justice, and it seriously should be changed.
And now here I am, on a train to my grandparents home to join them in a feast, writing my silly thoughts and speculating about the next update, I am really happy and curious to see how the Claire’s Sanctuary will turn out, and if the leaks were true, the 1993 dlc as well.
Speaking of the leak, I believe it is now gaining more strength, and it will be pretty hard to deny it for it was right on the money on many levels, but if I was Frontier, I wouldn’t work on a 1993 dlc just to prove it wrong haha ( even though I want it more than anything ). Another piece of information was leaked as well, and it is JWE2.
Even without a leak , seeing that JWE was a huge success and sold more than 1 million copies quite fast, it wouldn’t need a savy to know that a sequel is going to happen, the important question for me is what is its relation with the JWE content ? I know even that JWE is now getting much closer towards perfection, it is very limited, and I blame the game’s console compatible engine, sorry guys if I am going to say this, but JWE2 should be a pc only game, even if a newer generation of console gets released, it will always hold the potential for pc back. Just have a look at planet coaster ( which I own with all its dlcs ), it evolved from a normal coaster building game into a fully packed management game with multiple mechanics that will give you thousands of hours and limitless fun. Or better, have a look at the upcoming planet zoo, if only we could have JWE2 like it… sigh.
Something else that Frontier should be aware of, when JWE2 comes out, JWE and its dlcs will probably be costing more than 100$, and it would such a shame to expect players to have no use of that anymore, we should have a relation between the two games, a way to reward those who supported the first game and bought all its dlcs, maybe something similar to the Total War: Warhammer 1 and 2, where you need to own the first game to get the full experience from the second.
Wow i can't believe i wrote all of this, i am not a native english speaker, English isn't even my first foreign language, but sorry if i made some grammatical mistakes, i hoped you enjoyed reading this, and i would definitely like to hear you thoughts about it.
I believe I will begin with evaluating what was delivered in contrast of what was publicized. I remember when the gameplay demo was shown the first time, we all had that exquisite rush of excitement as we do now after watching the planet zoo gameplay.
We were shown just a couple of Brachiosaurus, a ceratosaurus and a triceratops ( in that order ), but we felt overwhelmed and just stood in awe, we dared to fantasize about the other possible species, and we felt hyper exited when that dinosaur we were hoping to get was shown in a species profile. Such experience was worth all the money we had, 44.99$ for regular and 49.99$ for deluxe to be exact.
Now to the actual review, the devs kept telling us that they wished to make the most realistic and graphically beatific dinosaurs ever seen in a video game, and no one can deny that they delivered what was promised and to that I salute them ! The game is so gorgeous and the dinosaurs are a majestic sight to behold.
They also told us that we will be able to drive the 4x4 jeeps, or the ACU helicopter, it was pretty amazing as well, maybe we wanted to do more with them ( retire/kill dinosaurs, rescue guests… ), but that remains to be seen in the future.
There was a moment when the two Brachiosaurus were going to clip into each other, but they cleverly moved the camera away, so basically they didn’t do anything wrong on that matter, that definitely wasn’t false advertising, the velociraptors pack hunting the triceratops in the trailer was.
Please don’t get me wrong, I am not here to drag the good name of Frontier to the ground, I am just making an honest assessment of the game. After release, we all got that adrenaline rush to play the game and unlock everything ( I finished the campaign in around 3 days ), as we advance through the campaign we were both amazed and disappointed. I loved seeing my ceratosaurus fight and kill a triceratops in a well made Jurassic World style animation, I hated it though when the Struthiomimus just stood in its place and waited for the Ceratosaurus to come and kill it ( the same goes for goats and humans ). I loved looking at the park when the rain was falling, everything was aesthetically perfected with cool wet effects on dinosaurs and buildings, I hated that the guests weren’t real ( as the individual dinosaurs are ), and the management side of the game was very limited. I can go on making a best seller book of things I liked and others I disliked, the point is already made clear.
Now, let’s talk about the major updates, I am not going to talk about the fallen kingdom update since it already kind of belongs with the original game. The first free major update I guess was the one that introduced challenge mode and fixed some heavily requested dinosaur size changes, it just showed the devs actually cared and are very smart to not quickly present a paid dlc, and I loved that ! Later would come the first paid dlc, the secrets of Dr. Wu. I personally didn’t pay for it, I was going to buy it later, but I happened to win it in a gleam giveaway, which proves that Frontier’s giveaways are legit and not just hoaxes. So, the dlc … I believe it added some pretty useful mechanics to the game, where we get to mess around much more with genetics, a little bit of extra story, around 8/10 hours of gameplay, it had 5 dinosaurs, with only the Troodon and Spinoraptor being interesting, the other three not so much being remodels of existing ones, using the same animations. Was it worth it? I believe so, if you want a couple of T-rex to coexist getting this dlc is a must, but for goodness’ sake rework some aspects of it to encourage people, just rework the Ankylodocus, it is actually useless.
Now comes the second paid dlc ( which I paid for by the way ), the cretaceous pack brought three new dinosaurs, and the star of the show was obviously the Iguanodon, why? Simply because it feels as a new dinosaur, with new animations, a different model, and it can fight back small and medium carnivores! That was like a dream come through for most of the fan base, the Carcharodontosaurus was welcome sight, the dreadnoughtus was definitely not, I mean I don’t need a taller/uglier Ankylodocus that have bad social/population requirements to tell me I didn’t put it in an enclosure with enough grassland, but anyways that was 2 good dinos and one not so good, it seems fair I guess. There were a couple of free updates, I don’t remember all of them, but I want to thank the guys at Frontier for their hard work, and please don’t hate me if I say something wasn’t totally good, I just want to provide my honest and respectful opinion about it. For the current fee, I believe this dlc is a little bit overpriced, it is not a big deal but I think it should cost 40% less.
The third dlc brought three carnivores, I loved the Proceratosaurus and the Herrerasaurus, but I hated how the Acrocanthosaurus looked from those preview pictures, I felt totally upset that it was unrecognisable from the JPOG variant, so I decided to not buy this dlc, but then I kept watching videos about it showing the the REAL Acro ( the preview picture should be changed, the Acro in it looks like it is having an allergic reaction whilst being on steroids ), so I bought the dlc, and was surprised of the amount of content that it provided, each dinosaur had multiple animations, and the Acrocanthosaurus as you would have guessed turned out to be my favorite of all of them, that preview pictures on the online shop does it no justice, and it seriously should be changed.
And now here I am, on a train to my grandparents home to join them in a feast, writing my silly thoughts and speculating about the next update, I am really happy and curious to see how the Claire’s Sanctuary will turn out, and if the leaks were true, the 1993 dlc as well.
Speaking of the leak, I believe it is now gaining more strength, and it will be pretty hard to deny it for it was right on the money on many levels, but if I was Frontier, I wouldn’t work on a 1993 dlc just to prove it wrong haha ( even though I want it more than anything ). Another piece of information was leaked as well, and it is JWE2.
Even without a leak , seeing that JWE was a huge success and sold more than 1 million copies quite fast, it wouldn’t need a savy to know that a sequel is going to happen, the important question for me is what is its relation with the JWE content ? I know even that JWE is now getting much closer towards perfection, it is very limited, and I blame the game’s console compatible engine, sorry guys if I am going to say this, but JWE2 should be a pc only game, even if a newer generation of console gets released, it will always hold the potential for pc back. Just have a look at planet coaster ( which I own with all its dlcs ), it evolved from a normal coaster building game into a fully packed management game with multiple mechanics that will give you thousands of hours and limitless fun. Or better, have a look at the upcoming planet zoo, if only we could have JWE2 like it… sigh.
Something else that Frontier should be aware of, when JWE2 comes out, JWE and its dlcs will probably be costing more than 100$, and it would such a shame to expect players to have no use of that anymore, we should have a relation between the two games, a way to reward those who supported the first game and bought all its dlcs, maybe something similar to the Total War: Warhammer 1 and 2, where you need to own the first game to get the full experience from the second.
Wow i can't believe i wrote all of this, i am not a native english speaker, English isn't even my first foreign language, but sorry if i made some grammatical mistakes, i hoped you enjoyed reading this, and i would definitely like to hear you thoughts about it.
