While I've spent dozens of hours building my perfect dino park in Jurassic World Evolution 2, Frontier's prehistoric series always felt like it was sort of a younger sibling to their other park-builders, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster. There are a lot of features in those two games that didn't make it into the first two Evolution entries. So when I got to play Jurassic World Evolution 3, I was most excited to see that it finally seems like a fully-fledged member of the Frontier flock, with the extremely deep customization and personalization features I've come to expect from the studio. Oh yeah, and the baby dinosaurs are pretty dang cute, too.
Spared No Expense
Evolution 3's story takes place some time after Jurassic World: Dominion, at a point where dinosaurs reintroduced to the wild in the previous films are struggling to adapt and survive on their own. That brings us as park managers to work with the Dinosaur Integration Network, seeking to help them thrive and, let's be honest, make a tidy profit showing them off to people who definitely, probably, are not going to get eaten. I mean it's honestly very uncommon at this point, and we've learned a lot over the years from myriad disasters, but we are still going to need you to sign this waiver.
And the dinosaurs we'll help to integrate have definitely never looked better, both in terms of textures and animations. Some of them are still stuck with their 1993 designs based on what is at this point 30-year-old paleontology, which is a bit of a shame to me as someone who likes to keep up-to-date on these things. But I suppose you couldn't really make a Jurassic game without the distinctive creature designs from the films, and there are also some more scientifically accurate models like the gorgeous Utahraptor, joining the base game here after becoming the breakout star of Evolution 2's DLC.
Of course, the marquee feature for Evolution 3 is the breeding system and juvenile dinosaurs. And they are, as you’d guess, super cute. It's not just the babies adding variety to the roster, though, since adult males and females can now sport subtle differences in size and body shape as well. You can even customize the skin patterns for males and females separately to more easily tell them apart. And this means group dynamics need to be carefully managed, too, since different species will require different ratios of males to females to be content. Some can get along with more than one male in the same enclosure, while others can't. And most species will not like being segregated by sex, so you'll want at least one of each.
The Next Generation
Breeding will also be central to the management gameplay, with the ability to raise a dinosaur's appeal rating by selecting parents with high ratings. You can even breed for specific traits, like a longer lifespan or the ability to coexist with other species more peacefully. Otherwise, wellbeing is a pretty straightforward matter of making sure the dinos have enough space, food, water, and their preferred terrain mix. Smaller herbivores like low ground cover, whereas some flying species actually prefer a barren landscape they can easily scan from above. There's also an added consideration of nest placement, since some species won't, well, do the deed if pesky little mammals with their funny flashing rectangles are watching. You should at least have to pay extra for that.
I didn't have enough time in my 90-minute demo to really dig super deep into this. I didn't get a great idea of how the financial management side is balanced, either. We did get to see a little bit of the campaign layer, though, which featured maps based on the Southwestern US, Hawaii, and Western China. And these maps look truly stunning even without prehistoric beasts wandering around them, showing off dramatic elevation changes, towering waterfalls, and unique vegetation. I especially enjoyed the one set in China's Sichuan Basin, which mixed the architecture of an alpine ski resort with the new East Asian building theme and a focus on flying species.
The basic routine feels pretty similar to Evolution 2 overall. You hire scientists, send them out on digs to collect DNA, synthesize new species, then let them out into the enclosure. It's at that point your breeding program takes over, which is the way to attain the highest appeal ratings. Naturally-bred dinosaurs are more interesting to guests than artificially incubated ones, which increases with the number of generations they have been breeding on their own. It's a bit of a challenge at first, since the low compatibility between artificially-incubated males and females makes producing viable offspring more difficult and time-consuming. But this compatibility can be improved over succeeding generations with help from your genetics team.
All Systems Online
Your scientists will also be responsible for researching new dig sites, enclosures, guest amenities, park administration buildings, and all the usual stuff. Each has a skill rating in three different areas and a special trait, like making expeditions faster or incubations cheaper, and demands a salary based on their proficiency. I did find it somewhat difficult to get a good spread of skills with the five slots and limited budget I was given, and I'm not sure if staff can develop new skills over time yet.
Managing the park requires ranger teams to visit enclosures and observe each animal to give you data on their physical and mental state, and you could be missing a major problem brewing if you don't set up your patrol routes well. You'll also need to provide camera coverage across your fence lines, or else you won't be notified if someone starts trying to chew a hole in one. Again, this is rare, but please, you came all this way, so you might as well sign the waiver.
But the bulk of the new stuff doesn't have anything to do with directly controlling capture and repair teams, which is still pretty cool. It doesn't even have to do with dinosaur breeding. It's the rich wealth of customization options now available. Terraforming is extremely powerful, with tons of tools that each have plenty of settings for raising, lowering, smoothing, adding noise, and creating ramps. You can paint custom ground textures. You can even build enclosures that use steep cliff edges instead of fences as part of their design to keep the dinos in.
Land Before Time
The way water works is a little bit strange. Aquatic species use their own dedicated lagoons, which is a whole other thing. But simply placing ground water isn't quite the same as it is in other park-builders. You can't just build a giant pit and fill it up to a certain height with water. Rather, ground water requires a flat surface as a starting point, and the depth is fixed using the water tool. This does let you create some fairly deep areas for semiaquatic species to wade and fish in. It looks nice! It's just not quite as flexible as what you can do on dry land, and took a bit of getting used to.
But when it comes to buildings, I was almost overwhelmed with all the new options. Similar to Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution 3 contains all the rotatable, resizeable, and recolorable building pieces to create just about anything you can imagine. Even the pre-made structures include the ability to select, remove, copy, and remix existing pieces down to the smallest bits like roof corners and floor tiles. Windows can even be edited to make it look like there are various different kinds of shops inside when you really zoom in for a peek.
Overall, the editing tools are quite impressive and generally pretty easy to use. It was a ton of fun to mess around with, even in the very limited amount of time I had, and I can't wait to see what other people who are more creatively skilled than me can do with them – especially since you'll be able to upload your creations to share with other players. And if you don't have the time to custom-build absolutely everything, there are several different pre-made building themes to pick from, including the East Asian-inspired set that I especially enjoyed.
Just about everything I've seen so far of Jurassic World Evolution 3 has me excited to thrill my guests and make my lawyers nervous (seriously, we do need you to sign that waiver). From dino breeding to dramatic and different new park locations to extremely robust customization tools, it feels like it truly deserves its spot at the table with Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster now, rather than relying on the, you know, freakin' dinosaurs to make up for some of what it was missing. We'll be able to decide whether or not to endorse this park in its entirety on October 21.
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