Jurassic World Evolution stomps out today
Life, uh, found a way
Frontier's dinopark-building management sim Jurassic World Evolution launched this morning, I'll remind you in case the waves of E3 announcements mean you forget games can even come out in 2018. It's a bit disappointing, our Jurassic World Evolution review will tell you, especially in comparison to Frontier's Planet Coaster, but you might still fancy it? It does, at the very least, have pretty dinosaurs.
Jurassic World Evolution gives us the job of InGen's new park manager, tasked with covering an archipelago with a string of successful dinozoos. Plop down buildings, hatch dinos, send expeditions to nab new DNA, splice DNA to make new horrors... y'know, Jurassic World. Alas, it just doesn't sound that good. As Fraser Brown said in his review:
"Jurassic World Evolution is the most boring of all possible outcomes for a dinosaur theme park sim. There's no outlet for creativity and, aside from the prehistoric pals you might make, managing the parks just isn't a lot of fun. By the time I'd unlocked enough to make the sandbox mode live up to its name, I realised I had nothing left to build.
"It's a greater disappointment because it falls so short of Planet Coaster. Frontier has already made the game that shows Evolution where it went wrong. It's not that Evolution couldn't have forged its own path, but it throws away lots of proven systems, often without substituting them for anything else. I don't want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far."
Lacking the wonderful personalisation tools of Planet Coaster seems a terrible shame, but the greatest disappointing is hearing I can't build a petting zoo with my cuter dinos.
Jurassic World Evolution is out now for £45/€55/$55 on Steam.
Elsewhere in the cross-medium frenzy surrounding the release of new movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Rocket League is getting Jurassiced up next week.