Mini Video Game Review – Jurassic World Evolution 2

Recently I have been playing Jurassic World Evolution 2 on the PC; and it’s OK! Developed by Frontier Developments; Jurassic World Evolution 2 is a construction and management simulation game where the player gets to build their own theme park featuring the Dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park film series. The game is a sequel to Jurassic World Evolution, a game I really enjoyed; this one though is a bit pants! The game is nicely set-up in story after Fallen Kingdom, and allows the player to capture wild dinosaurs around the world, instead of just creating them in a laboratory. The game features an array of new features, cool new animations and behaviors, and of course new species to exhibit; including more Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs, and Marine Reptiles. But that’s sort of where the good things end! The game has done a radical shift on it’s gameplay mechanics, meaning fans of the first game might find it a real struggle to instantly jump in and play. Breeding dinosaurs is very similar to the first game, in principal, but some of the cool ways to customize dinosaurs, such as choosing colour schemes has made it a whole lot more difficult to do so. You will find your dinosaurs do look rather boring, compared to the more simple but aesthetically more pleasing and exciting ways of colouring dino’s in the first game. The game’s new mechanics mean making dinosaurs and researching is on a much slower pace, and can get rather annoying very quickly. The game does not feature a decent challenge mode like the first game, where they were challenges, but a lot more free reign to do what you want to do. The game does not help matters by labelling gameplay options wrong. The ‘campaign’ mode is just a glorified tutorial, the ‘challenge’ mode is very difficult to do, even on easy mode, and ‘chaos theory’ is set-up wrong! The idea with ‘Chaos Theory’ is it allows you to re-build the parks based on the films, but the first level is so directional, I felt like I wasn’t being allowed to build Jurassic Park how I wanted to do it, which is what the mode is supposed to be; so I just stopped playing. The game does have it’s moments, but it’s rather stressful during everything else, and at the end of the day, it just makes me want to play the first game. I sort of now wish that there wasn’t a sequel, and instead the good parts of this game should have just been added to the first; as expansions. It’s the latest disappointment, in a year of several disappointing games!