Additional features
I’ve only played for around 10 hours so far, but already feel the game is missing a lot of key things...
1. Automatic response - I actually really do not like the fact that the game alerts you to wall breaches (that seem to occur entirely randomly) and dinosaurs escaping, yet the ranger teams and ACU sit there and don’t respond at all. I understand that some missions are set to allow certain dinosaurs to go on rampages etc, but having an option at these buildings to automatically respond to incidents would provide a much better game-play experience. If players do not wish to utilise this, simply turn the automatic response off at the desired buildings.
2. Power utilisation - I’m on the second island, and almost stuck. There’s a significant power shortage and space to build additional power facilities, and before long, my budget is spent just making the basic park infrastructure. Grant buildings the ability to be assigned power as priority to better manage your parks. Maybe reduce the cost of small power stations too.
3. Financing - my first island park grossed over 15m in funding, but I moved over to the second island and I no longer have that funding, despite the research and genomes I’ve done on the first island being transferred. It doesn’t make sense that you can’t utilise the funding on the next island. Dinosaurs are also your main source of income and if you only have the funding to attempt to bring one Dino into your park to start with, and the incubation fails (even at 80%+ genome it seems to happen too often) you’re basically left bankrupt with the need to start over.
4. Pathways and roads - the ability to build staff-only areas. Jurassic World (the movie) has an entire north side of the island that is a restricted area, and there are restricted roads with which vehicles drive on, yet we can’t build that in the game. If I allocate an area specific for powerstations to manage the power grid, the roads over there should be restricted personnel only... but it turns out, 400+ tourists are happy to spend their afternoon walking around powerstations and pilons.
5. Space - the buildings and structures are huge, and the space to build in is often tiny. Upon first entry to the game, I ended up restarting the first island twice because I didn’t know what space was available to me because the intro tutorial doesn’t help much with instructing you about power or build space.
6. Camera - I’m currently playing on a laptop and the camera management is terrible. Once clicking on a Dino, the camera pans down, and only sometimes it’ll return to the previous view... which then when I was to build something, there’s a good chance I can’t see where I’m placing the building, or what specifically is obstructing it... in short, I end up with a lot of wasted space because there’s no grid-zoning or build view when placing buildings. The camera functionality seems very poorly implemented, but is this because I don’t have a middle mouse button on laptop to fully utilise the camera?
7. Enclosures - the enclosure system is great for the first couple of dinosaurs... but as soon as you get one of the early herbivores that charges the fence even when it’s happy being in the enclosure, it breaks out and causes havoc. You tranq it, put it back in there, and it breaks back out again. Making electric fences around your enclosure utilises way too much power for the small power stations to provide for... so ultimately even though you have access to certain dinosaurs and you keep all of them happy, you’re limited to create only a few of them while you don’t have electrified fences.
8. Sandbox Island - the sandbox island is pretty pointless. There aren’t any real goals other than just throw down whatever you want to the stage you’ve unlocked items, so your park is extremely limited just like the other islands. I suspect the sandbox island is fun when you have everything unlocked, but until then you’re just better off doing the main mission islands.
9. Time-based, with no time control - everything takes time to do anything, yet there’s no control at all over any time parameters. You can’t pause to successfully plan anything, you can’t speed up to pass time quicker when waiting for your profits to allow you to continue building... it’s almost like the design of this game was initially going to be a pay-to-win game on mobile, before the project team realised that there’s no multiplayer aspect so why would anyone want to pay to play?
10. Variety - there’s very little variety in the game right now. It’s either herbivores, or carnivores for land-based creatures and that’s it. Are there plans to introduce sea-building and aviaries?
11. Research/Fossils - I feel like having the player involved more in these processes would be better. As it stands, the digging and analysing the fossils is all done by time-based actions which the player does nothing except click them (yawn) isn’t there anything here that you can implement to actually involve the player? Most of the game time is currently spent sat waiting. Same goes for researching...
12. Dino Release - the animation is great the first time you make a new Dino species... after that, you don’t care to watch the same animal come out of the Hammond facility over and over. It should be automatic to show it the first time only for each species and just release quickly for remaining species members. Releasing multiple dinos at once should also be a thing.
13. Dino age - it makes no sense to release only adult dinos that die of old age pretty quickly. You see infants in the movies, so why don’t we have those in the wild?
14. Herbivore feeding / plant life - I really don’t understand this bit... why do you have a platform with a bush on it, when there’s the option to place foliage? Why can’t we unlock and research new Jurassic euro plantation and provide said plantation in the enclosures for herbivores to eat? Matching what species prefers what foliage should be something that adds to the dinosaurs happiness/comfort ratings, rather than having a generic bush they all share.
15. Sickness - leading on from the last one; sickness is entirely random and it seems no matter what dinos get sick... having the right foliage available to dinos should reduce their risk of becoming sick. As for carnivores, they shouldn’t get sick as often unless they eat the wrong kinds of meats, or if they eat other sick dinosaurs.
16. Mixing enclosures - in Jurassic world, the enclosures are often mixed with predators and herbivores that live in almost harmony where the predators only make kills where necessary when feeding... this doesn’t happen in game. As soon as a herbivore gets released to a carnivore pen, they fight and die instantly.
I’ve only played for around 10 hours so far, but already feel the game is missing a lot of key things...
1. Automatic response - I actually really do not like the fact that the game alerts you to wall breaches (that seem to occur entirely randomly) and dinosaurs escaping, yet the ranger teams and ACU sit there and don’t respond at all. I understand that some missions are set to allow certain dinosaurs to go on rampages etc, but having an option at these buildings to automatically respond to incidents would provide a much better game-play experience. If players do not wish to utilise this, simply turn the automatic response off at the desired buildings.
2. Power utilisation - I’m on the second island, and almost stuck. There’s a significant power shortage and space to build additional power facilities, and before long, my budget is spent just making the basic park infrastructure. Grant buildings the ability to be assigned power as priority to better manage your parks. Maybe reduce the cost of small power stations too.
3. Financing - my first island park grossed over 15m in funding, but I moved over to the second island and I no longer have that funding, despite the research and genomes I’ve done on the first island being transferred. It doesn’t make sense that you can’t utilise the funding on the next island. Dinosaurs are also your main source of income and if you only have the funding to attempt to bring one Dino into your park to start with, and the incubation fails (even at 80%+ genome it seems to happen too often) you’re basically left bankrupt with the need to start over.
4. Pathways and roads - the ability to build staff-only areas. Jurassic World (the movie) has an entire north side of the island that is a restricted area, and there are restricted roads with which vehicles drive on, yet we can’t build that in the game. If I allocate an area specific for powerstations to manage the power grid, the roads over there should be restricted personnel only... but it turns out, 400+ tourists are happy to spend their afternoon walking around powerstations and pilons.
5. Space - the buildings and structures are huge, and the space to build in is often tiny. Upon first entry to the game, I ended up restarting the first island twice because I didn’t know what space was available to me because the intro tutorial doesn’t help much with instructing you about power or build space.
6. Camera - I’m currently playing on a laptop and the camera management is terrible. Once clicking on a Dino, the camera pans down, and only sometimes it’ll return to the previous view... which then when I was to build something, there’s a good chance I can’t see where I’m placing the building, or what specifically is obstructing it... in short, I end up with a lot of wasted space because there’s no grid-zoning or build view when placing buildings. The camera functionality seems very poorly implemented, but is this because I don’t have a middle mouse button on laptop to fully utilise the camera?
7. Enclosures - the enclosure system is great for the first couple of dinosaurs... but as soon as you get one of the early herbivores that charges the fence even when it’s happy being in the enclosure, it breaks out and causes havoc. You tranq it, put it back in there, and it breaks back out again. Making electric fences around your enclosure utilises way too much power for the small power stations to provide for... so ultimately even though you have access to certain dinosaurs and you keep all of them happy, you’re limited to create only a few of them while you don’t have electrified fences.
8. Sandbox Island - the sandbox island is pretty pointless. There aren’t any real goals other than just throw down whatever you want to the stage you’ve unlocked items, so your park is extremely limited just like the other islands. I suspect the sandbox island is fun when you have everything unlocked, but until then you’re just better off doing the main mission islands.
9. Time-based, with no time control - everything takes time to do anything, yet there’s no control at all over any time parameters. You can’t pause to successfully plan anything, you can’t speed up to pass time quicker when waiting for your profits to allow you to continue building... it’s almost like the design of this game was initially going to be a pay-to-win game on mobile, before the project team realised that there’s no multiplayer aspect so why would anyone want to pay to play?
10. Variety - there’s very little variety in the game right now. It’s either herbivores, or carnivores for land-based creatures and that’s it. Are there plans to introduce sea-building and aviaries?
11. Research/Fossils - I feel like having the player involved more in these processes would be better. As it stands, the digging and analysing the fossils is all done by time-based actions which the player does nothing except click them (yawn) isn’t there anything here that you can implement to actually involve the player? Most of the game time is currently spent sat waiting. Same goes for researching...
12. Dino Release - the animation is great the first time you make a new Dino species... after that, you don’t care to watch the same animal come out of the Hammond facility over and over. It should be automatic to show it the first time only for each species and just release quickly for remaining species members. Releasing multiple dinos at once should also be a thing.
13. Dino age - it makes no sense to release only adult dinos that die of old age pretty quickly. You see infants in the movies, so why don’t we have those in the wild?
14. Herbivore feeding / plant life - I really don’t understand this bit... why do you have a platform with a bush on it, when there’s the option to place foliage? Why can’t we unlock and research new Jurassic euro plantation and provide said plantation in the enclosures for herbivores to eat? Matching what species prefers what foliage should be something that adds to the dinosaurs happiness/comfort ratings, rather than having a generic bush they all share.
15. Sickness - leading on from the last one; sickness is entirely random and it seems no matter what dinos get sick... having the right foliage available to dinos should reduce their risk of becoming sick. As for carnivores, they shouldn’t get sick as often unless they eat the wrong kinds of meats, or if they eat other sick dinosaurs.
16. Mixing enclosures - in Jurassic world, the enclosures are often mixed with predators and herbivores that live in almost harmony where the predators only make kills where necessary when feeding... this doesn’t happen in game. As soon as a herbivore gets released to a carnivore pen, they fight and die instantly.
