So here is my Review after completing Campaign, Chaos Theory, and doing all of the challenge maps on Medium or Easy.
Campaign: I enjoyed the campaign. It showcased the new biomes and had a good bit of story telling that made you want more and to keep playing. It started to drag a bit once I got to Pennsylvania and become more of a regular park builder mode but it was still good and had good environments in it. I really liked the Fall colored leaves. I hope we can get a season changer for forest at some point. Of course the only issue with it is that it was so short. But I think Evo Square's theory that it had to be cut short so they didn't give away movie content from Dominion makes the most sense. I think the Dominion Chaos Theory will essentially be a part 2 to the short campaign we got. They may even gives us a part 2 to campaign and a Dominion Chaos Theory Mode. We can only hope. There's nothing really bad you can say about the campaign. The only way they could improve it would be to be a little more tutorial driven when it comes to how the game works when it comes to unlocking things. Needing to incubate to unlock a species would be a good tip to give us during the campaign or letting us know if we encounter it during the campaign it also unlocks it. As it stands the only 2 species I haven't unlocked are the indoraptor and the Cryo because the game is bugged on the Cryo dig site, you can get it in campaign mission 4 i've heard, but I don't feel like replaying the campaign so soon at the moment. If we were told the process people may have prolonged their campaign experience to get more unlocks out of the way.
Chaos Theory Mode: Most of what the game has to offer is contained in this mode. The different environments were done very well. Adding the waterfall to JP was a nice touch BUT we should be able to build closer to the pond the waterfall is at so we can make a better looking arrival point in sandbox. The 5 deaths look great and thankfully they've kept the maps much flatter for us this year. JP was VERY challenging, but it forces you to figure this game out so I wont complain about it now that I finally completed it. You aren't given any kid gloves if you do these modes in order. I think most of the difficulty comes from player error however and not anything wrong with the game. My only real gripe with JP in general is that they haven't carried over the JWE1 Designs so many of the buildings now are less movie accurate, the bunker is completely wrong and I SORELY missed the Raptor Security Pen. The San Diego Amphitheatre is STUNNING! Bravo on that! I hope it becomes useable on other maps at some point. One thing it is missing though is a View Option. It's essentially a Viewing Gallery, but it doesn't give us the option to Show View from it, that would be a nice addition to the Amphitheater. JP3's Sorna easter eggs are very nice with the air strip, worker village, and parachute. Unfortunately aside from the raptor attack on the Spino it isn't very interesting and is way too short. I feel like JP3 deserved a better scenario than this. Maybe we could have reestablished Site B in this mode, studied Raptor behavior and studied the Spinosaurus and why it's such a tank. I feel like the tranqing and transporting dinosaurs from Sorna could have been a small introduction before making JW that was contained in the JW Scenario. The JW mode wasn't bad, I think we all just wish we were able to have fences/walls to create a movie accurate Rex Kingdom with a Log Viewer and Indominus Rex Paddock. RTJW mode was very well done, the best story in any of the Chaos Modes in my opinion. It was heart breaking to destroy JW at the end because the devs made a fantastic recreation of JW for us to explore! This final mode is short but it contains the best dialogue in Chaos Mode and includes some campaign mode type tracking of Blue and Rexy which also made this final Chaos Mode better than the rest. Which brings me to the overall dissatisfying part of Chaos Mode.....the lack of any real story.
Thoughts and Theories on Chaos Mode/Campaign: In JWE1 the campaign and dlc's contained much more satisfying stories and dialogue. The characters talked much more and had much more entertaining and witty things to say. You really connected with the characters and wanted to play out the rest of the story. Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm was FANTASTIC in JWE1 in the main campaign and the RTJP dlc story was also amazing as far as the dialogue and story telling went. Campaign and RTJW (isla nublar) in JWE2 were the best at giving us goood dialogue and a good story. But both were very short and still weren't as attention grabbing as JWE1. That's the only real down fall of JWE2's campaign on chaos mode. Neither gives us much dialogue or a story. You only get a very few lines of dialogue right before and right after you are given an objective and complete an objective. This left me feeling completely unengaged with any of the characters. The voice actors were very underused and I don't understand why? In JWE1 the characters would talk and comment while you were in the process of an objective, not just before and after. If you were to make a stegosaurus you'd get dialogue before, then when you got enough of the genome you might get more dialogue, create it more dialogue, after creating it you'd have to please it or test it, more dialogue. JWE2 is just lacking this character involvement. Considering how the Chaos Mode leads up to the present and then we have the campaign that gets us into Dominion the future Chaos Mode... I have a theory that they started with Chaos Mode and then just threw the campaign together at the end to polish the game up a bit. Chaos starts as a straight park builder with JP, and San Diego. Then we have a tranqing mission thrown in, another park builder, and then finally a more story driven RTJW/isla nublar mode. It kind of seems to me like they progressed in story telling from JP to return to nublar and as they progressed in making JWE2 the games story telling got better. This would be why the return introduced dino tracking missions which were then featured heavily in the campaign. It's like they started as a park builder story then decided they needed to make a more interactive story and progressed into making the campaign. Then unfortunately they had to cut the campaign short since the movie was delayed. That's just my crazy theory. But either way. The campaign and Chaos Mode are good, but sorely lacking in story telling and character dialogue. I hope they do a better job with that in future dlcs they might do.
Challenge Mode: I did all challenge maps on Medium except for the UK I did that one on Easy just to get the Nigersaurus as fast as I could. The challenge modes surprisingly were more fun than I expected and way less frustrating than JP Chaos Mode. But Hard is really Hard! lol. I liked the different pop up decisions we had to make. Give a scientist a raise or tell them no. Compensate an employees family or tell them to get lost. All of these little things were fun to read and make a decision on. I think Chaos Mode could have benefited if these type of pop ups were in Chaos Mode and we got some character dialogue about the pros and cons of each decision. In the end challenge mode is better than the last game, nobody wants to do them, but at least these ones are more fun than the last games.
Overall Gameplay: Overall I think the gameplay has improved ALOT. I like all the new additions and how things work. The game definitely plays more like a zoo manager sim game. Unlike JWE1 we don't have every dinosaur getting upset because it drizzles outside and escaping. THANK GOD! Finally our challenges come from storm damage and veterinary issues like injuries and diseases. The game works much better this way. It feels like you're actually managing a zoo or park. There are all types of little intricacies that make dinosaurs issues slightly different from time to time. Sometimes bacteria can contaminate meat feeders and that's why your dinosaurs get sick. You have to disinfect the feeder along with medicating the dinosaurs otherwise the problem wont go away. This is a nice break from normal diseases that are more random. It also only happens to meat feeders and not a goat feeder so they kept it realistic. People complain about the common cold or the desert disease that goes away on it's own, but I love it. Again it's another variation that plays out realistically. Another thing I noticed is that although dinosaurs usually injure themselves in fights, storms seem to injure them now too. Hurricanes and other storms can give your dinosaurs broken bones or concussions which is wonderful! This is something people wanted in JWE1 and they gave it to us in JWE2 and it's a nice touch. Many people have complained about fights or injuries happening too often, but it all depends on how you play. In my experience if your dinosaurs are docile and don't have dominance traits they wont fight very often and don't get injured very often. I've had play throughs where my raptors or triceratops are fighting non stop, but if you change their genes or don't incubate ones with negative traits they hardly every cause injuries to each other. So these complaints aren't well founded in my opinion, it's all in how you play. The game overall is much more satisfying and dynamic. It's a big improvement. The scientists being needed and having to manage them also improves the game in my opinion. One of the biggest things I missed in JWE1 was that we didn't have any connection to our staff and couldn't manage them at all. JWE2 fixes that and connects you with your staff. I hope it can be improved upon. Scientists are a good start, but I'd love to have to manage our Ranger Teams or Vet Teams. It would also be nice to get different looking Ranger and Vet Techs based upon your hires. I hope this is expanded upon if possible.
Gripes and Short Comings: There are some things that weren't carried over. Individual trees, some JP Signs, some of the JP buildings, some of the different fences and variety of same, SHALE, omg SHALE as a paint brush isn't in this game even though it was the best pain brush and was restricted to isla pena in JWE1, I really hoped we'd get full access to this brush in the sequel. The story doesn't contain much story. "is there going to be a story in your uh, uh, your story modes?" There aren't movie skins for many movie species like the Corthy or Dilo for example, at least not official movie skins like the Rex or Raptors have. Some of the movie skins are a bit off as well like the JP3 female Raptor skin. Things like the JP Bunker not being the Bunker in the Movie anymore like in JWE1 is also baffling, if it's going to be included unlike the raptor pen, why change it into something it wasn't? We can't cycle different view points in the viewing galleries, this should be fixed.
Things I'd like to see added: Anything listed in my gripes, anything that was in JWE1 RTJP dlc needs to be carried over as additional building options so we're talking the bunker, the maintenance shed, the raptor pen, a few alternate arrival helipads, we don't even have a helipad arrival option for JW, the original InGen helicopter skin for the arrival helipad. The fences from JWE1 from both era's. Obviously the trees and more decoration options. Fences/Walls so we can create the Rex Kingdom and Indominus Paddock. Give the Amphitheatre a show view mode. Give us more view angles to cycle through in the viewing galleries. Allow us to put more lagoon viewers side by side of each other. Give us a shark feeder that's bigger and that can be hung over the middle of the lagoon. Add in JP variants for the aviaries and lagoons. Make the Aviaries heights adjustable or make them automatically go higher, some type of toggle mechanism that changes the aviaries from a glass dome to a steel caged one (if that's in the game somehow and I missed it I apologize but I dont think it is). Add a few more various animations for social and fighting behaviors over time. With JW Camp Cretaceous ruining the movie story and adding in sabretooth tigers, I think that leaves the door open for Megalodon....just pointing that out lol. SAUROPODS NEED ATTACKS. This cant be stressed enough, it's been two games and sauropods cant defend themselves and can be killed by small theropods, this has to be fixed and don't just take away theropods ability to hunt sauropods, that's lazy, give sauropods the ability to fight back. I know this violates your gaming honor, but a dlc that will unlock all cosmetic genes and everything else that you can toggle on and off would be very nice. The sandbox needs more options. The ability to change type of guests while in the sandbox map is needed. Turning off all combat and cohabitation issues in sandbox is needed as people really want this. At least for sandbox if we have to hire scientists some scientists should be stars from the franchise that you can hire, how about hiring Henry Wu or Dr Sorkin from JPTG to be your genetics person, Ian Malcolm for his logistics skill, Eli Sattler or Sarah or Gary Harding for their Health Veterinary skills. Sandbox should let us use foliage from any biomes to spruce and spice things up. In real zoo's you can have a desert African zone next to a polar exhibit so it would make sense. I could go on forever so I'll stop myself.
Overall Rating: I think I would agree with most other reviews on a score rating of 7 out of 10. The game is really an 8 or 9 but it's lacking so many things from JWE1 and the sandbox mode needs more options. I'm confident given Frontier's track record of listening to their fans an improving on their games that we'll easily get there over the next year or two. Thanks for making a great game that truly is head and shoulders above the last game. Thank you!
Campaign: I enjoyed the campaign. It showcased the new biomes and had a good bit of story telling that made you want more and to keep playing. It started to drag a bit once I got to Pennsylvania and become more of a regular park builder mode but it was still good and had good environments in it. I really liked the Fall colored leaves. I hope we can get a season changer for forest at some point. Of course the only issue with it is that it was so short. But I think Evo Square's theory that it had to be cut short so they didn't give away movie content from Dominion makes the most sense. I think the Dominion Chaos Theory will essentially be a part 2 to the short campaign we got. They may even gives us a part 2 to campaign and a Dominion Chaos Theory Mode. We can only hope. There's nothing really bad you can say about the campaign. The only way they could improve it would be to be a little more tutorial driven when it comes to how the game works when it comes to unlocking things. Needing to incubate to unlock a species would be a good tip to give us during the campaign or letting us know if we encounter it during the campaign it also unlocks it. As it stands the only 2 species I haven't unlocked are the indoraptor and the Cryo because the game is bugged on the Cryo dig site, you can get it in campaign mission 4 i've heard, but I don't feel like replaying the campaign so soon at the moment. If we were told the process people may have prolonged their campaign experience to get more unlocks out of the way.
Chaos Theory Mode: Most of what the game has to offer is contained in this mode. The different environments were done very well. Adding the waterfall to JP was a nice touch BUT we should be able to build closer to the pond the waterfall is at so we can make a better looking arrival point in sandbox. The 5 deaths look great and thankfully they've kept the maps much flatter for us this year. JP was VERY challenging, but it forces you to figure this game out so I wont complain about it now that I finally completed it. You aren't given any kid gloves if you do these modes in order. I think most of the difficulty comes from player error however and not anything wrong with the game. My only real gripe with JP in general is that they haven't carried over the JWE1 Designs so many of the buildings now are less movie accurate, the bunker is completely wrong and I SORELY missed the Raptor Security Pen. The San Diego Amphitheatre is STUNNING! Bravo on that! I hope it becomes useable on other maps at some point. One thing it is missing though is a View Option. It's essentially a Viewing Gallery, but it doesn't give us the option to Show View from it, that would be a nice addition to the Amphitheater. JP3's Sorna easter eggs are very nice with the air strip, worker village, and parachute. Unfortunately aside from the raptor attack on the Spino it isn't very interesting and is way too short. I feel like JP3 deserved a better scenario than this. Maybe we could have reestablished Site B in this mode, studied Raptor behavior and studied the Spinosaurus and why it's such a tank. I feel like the tranqing and transporting dinosaurs from Sorna could have been a small introduction before making JW that was contained in the JW Scenario. The JW mode wasn't bad, I think we all just wish we were able to have fences/walls to create a movie accurate Rex Kingdom with a Log Viewer and Indominus Rex Paddock. RTJW mode was very well done, the best story in any of the Chaos Modes in my opinion. It was heart breaking to destroy JW at the end because the devs made a fantastic recreation of JW for us to explore! This final mode is short but it contains the best dialogue in Chaos Mode and includes some campaign mode type tracking of Blue and Rexy which also made this final Chaos Mode better than the rest. Which brings me to the overall dissatisfying part of Chaos Mode.....the lack of any real story.
Thoughts and Theories on Chaos Mode/Campaign: In JWE1 the campaign and dlc's contained much more satisfying stories and dialogue. The characters talked much more and had much more entertaining and witty things to say. You really connected with the characters and wanted to play out the rest of the story. Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm was FANTASTIC in JWE1 in the main campaign and the RTJP dlc story was also amazing as far as the dialogue and story telling went. Campaign and RTJW (isla nublar) in JWE2 were the best at giving us goood dialogue and a good story. But both were very short and still weren't as attention grabbing as JWE1. That's the only real down fall of JWE2's campaign on chaos mode. Neither gives us much dialogue or a story. You only get a very few lines of dialogue right before and right after you are given an objective and complete an objective. This left me feeling completely unengaged with any of the characters. The voice actors were very underused and I don't understand why? In JWE1 the characters would talk and comment while you were in the process of an objective, not just before and after. If you were to make a stegosaurus you'd get dialogue before, then when you got enough of the genome you might get more dialogue, create it more dialogue, after creating it you'd have to please it or test it, more dialogue. JWE2 is just lacking this character involvement. Considering how the Chaos Mode leads up to the present and then we have the campaign that gets us into Dominion the future Chaos Mode... I have a theory that they started with Chaos Mode and then just threw the campaign together at the end to polish the game up a bit. Chaos starts as a straight park builder with JP, and San Diego. Then we have a tranqing mission thrown in, another park builder, and then finally a more story driven RTJW/isla nublar mode. It kind of seems to me like they progressed in story telling from JP to return to nublar and as they progressed in making JWE2 the games story telling got better. This would be why the return introduced dino tracking missions which were then featured heavily in the campaign. It's like they started as a park builder story then decided they needed to make a more interactive story and progressed into making the campaign. Then unfortunately they had to cut the campaign short since the movie was delayed. That's just my crazy theory. But either way. The campaign and Chaos Mode are good, but sorely lacking in story telling and character dialogue. I hope they do a better job with that in future dlcs they might do.
Challenge Mode: I did all challenge maps on Medium except for the UK I did that one on Easy just to get the Nigersaurus as fast as I could. The challenge modes surprisingly were more fun than I expected and way less frustrating than JP Chaos Mode. But Hard is really Hard! lol. I liked the different pop up decisions we had to make. Give a scientist a raise or tell them no. Compensate an employees family or tell them to get lost. All of these little things were fun to read and make a decision on. I think Chaos Mode could have benefited if these type of pop ups were in Chaos Mode and we got some character dialogue about the pros and cons of each decision. In the end challenge mode is better than the last game, nobody wants to do them, but at least these ones are more fun than the last games.
Overall Gameplay: Overall I think the gameplay has improved ALOT. I like all the new additions and how things work. The game definitely plays more like a zoo manager sim game. Unlike JWE1 we don't have every dinosaur getting upset because it drizzles outside and escaping. THANK GOD! Finally our challenges come from storm damage and veterinary issues like injuries and diseases. The game works much better this way. It feels like you're actually managing a zoo or park. There are all types of little intricacies that make dinosaurs issues slightly different from time to time. Sometimes bacteria can contaminate meat feeders and that's why your dinosaurs get sick. You have to disinfect the feeder along with medicating the dinosaurs otherwise the problem wont go away. This is a nice break from normal diseases that are more random. It also only happens to meat feeders and not a goat feeder so they kept it realistic. People complain about the common cold or the desert disease that goes away on it's own, but I love it. Again it's another variation that plays out realistically. Another thing I noticed is that although dinosaurs usually injure themselves in fights, storms seem to injure them now too. Hurricanes and other storms can give your dinosaurs broken bones or concussions which is wonderful! This is something people wanted in JWE1 and they gave it to us in JWE2 and it's a nice touch. Many people have complained about fights or injuries happening too often, but it all depends on how you play. In my experience if your dinosaurs are docile and don't have dominance traits they wont fight very often and don't get injured very often. I've had play throughs where my raptors or triceratops are fighting non stop, but if you change their genes or don't incubate ones with negative traits they hardly every cause injuries to each other. So these complaints aren't well founded in my opinion, it's all in how you play. The game overall is much more satisfying and dynamic. It's a big improvement. The scientists being needed and having to manage them also improves the game in my opinion. One of the biggest things I missed in JWE1 was that we didn't have any connection to our staff and couldn't manage them at all. JWE2 fixes that and connects you with your staff. I hope it can be improved upon. Scientists are a good start, but I'd love to have to manage our Ranger Teams or Vet Teams. It would also be nice to get different looking Ranger and Vet Techs based upon your hires. I hope this is expanded upon if possible.
Gripes and Short Comings: There are some things that weren't carried over. Individual trees, some JP Signs, some of the JP buildings, some of the different fences and variety of same, SHALE, omg SHALE as a paint brush isn't in this game even though it was the best pain brush and was restricted to isla pena in JWE1, I really hoped we'd get full access to this brush in the sequel. The story doesn't contain much story. "is there going to be a story in your uh, uh, your story modes?" There aren't movie skins for many movie species like the Corthy or Dilo for example, at least not official movie skins like the Rex or Raptors have. Some of the movie skins are a bit off as well like the JP3 female Raptor skin. Things like the JP Bunker not being the Bunker in the Movie anymore like in JWE1 is also baffling, if it's going to be included unlike the raptor pen, why change it into something it wasn't? We can't cycle different view points in the viewing galleries, this should be fixed.
Things I'd like to see added: Anything listed in my gripes, anything that was in JWE1 RTJP dlc needs to be carried over as additional building options so we're talking the bunker, the maintenance shed, the raptor pen, a few alternate arrival helipads, we don't even have a helipad arrival option for JW, the original InGen helicopter skin for the arrival helipad. The fences from JWE1 from both era's. Obviously the trees and more decoration options. Fences/Walls so we can create the Rex Kingdom and Indominus Paddock. Give the Amphitheatre a show view mode. Give us more view angles to cycle through in the viewing galleries. Allow us to put more lagoon viewers side by side of each other. Give us a shark feeder that's bigger and that can be hung over the middle of the lagoon. Add in JP variants for the aviaries and lagoons. Make the Aviaries heights adjustable or make them automatically go higher, some type of toggle mechanism that changes the aviaries from a glass dome to a steel caged one (if that's in the game somehow and I missed it I apologize but I dont think it is). Add a few more various animations for social and fighting behaviors over time. With JW Camp Cretaceous ruining the movie story and adding in sabretooth tigers, I think that leaves the door open for Megalodon....just pointing that out lol. SAUROPODS NEED ATTACKS. This cant be stressed enough, it's been two games and sauropods cant defend themselves and can be killed by small theropods, this has to be fixed and don't just take away theropods ability to hunt sauropods, that's lazy, give sauropods the ability to fight back. I know this violates your gaming honor, but a dlc that will unlock all cosmetic genes and everything else that you can toggle on and off would be very nice. The sandbox needs more options. The ability to change type of guests while in the sandbox map is needed. Turning off all combat and cohabitation issues in sandbox is needed as people really want this. At least for sandbox if we have to hire scientists some scientists should be stars from the franchise that you can hire, how about hiring Henry Wu or Dr Sorkin from JPTG to be your genetics person, Ian Malcolm for his logistics skill, Eli Sattler or Sarah or Gary Harding for their Health Veterinary skills. Sandbox should let us use foliage from any biomes to spruce and spice things up. In real zoo's you can have a desert African zone next to a polar exhibit so it would make sense. I could go on forever so I'll stop myself.
Overall Rating: I think I would agree with most other reviews on a score rating of 7 out of 10. The game is really an 8 or 9 but it's lacking so many things from JWE1 and the sandbox mode needs more options. I'm confident given Frontier's track record of listening to their fans an improving on their games that we'll easily get there over the next year or two. Thanks for making a great game that truly is head and shoulders above the last game. Thank you!