Jurassic World Evolution 2: Not Childs Play
These dinosaurs are irrational, man.
The dinosaurs should have just died.
That’s what I told myself — or shouted aloud in my office — during the most difficult parts of Jurassic World Evolution 2. These prehistoric creatures have no right to exist on our planet anymore, and I’m not sure I have any right to fight nature with my strategically placed pond, guest pathing, attractions, and boba shop. As Dr. Ian Malcom famously said in Jurassic Park, “life, uh, finds a way.” Building my dinosaur zoo in Jurassic World Evolution 2 felt like conquering millions of years of history.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 is the sequel to last year’s fantastic park simulator. If you played the dinosaur expansion pack for Zoo Tycoon back in the day, you’ll understand what I mean. However, for the uninitiated, Jurassic World Evolution 2 allows you to create your own Jurassic Park (or Jurassic Worlds, if you prefer the sequels). It’s a fascinating simulator game: Make fossils into living creatures, keep your employees happy so you don’t get Dennis Nedry’d, and put that T-shirt shop right next to the velociraptors. Though punishing and possibly erratic, the game shines by allowing players to take over the movie parks and see how they’d run things differently.
While the campaign in Jurassic World Evolution 2 is clumsy and mostly feels like a glorified tutorial, the game’s real action takes place in the new Chaos Theory mode. This mode challenges players to correct their mistakes from the past. You’re in charge of creating Jurassic Park in its Spielberg setting and time period — without the use of Gyrospheres or other post-’90s technology that other play modes allow. However, where park creator John Hammond failed in the film, you must succeed. You’ll be given quests, but you’re mostly free to complete them your way, while laying out your park to your liking. Chaos Theory modes are available for each of the five Jurassic Park and World films, transporting you from Isla Nublar to San Diego and back again.
To keep my park running smoothly in Jurassic World Evolution 2, I found that I had to micromanage a lot. As in the original game, I must create pens and cater to the environmental needs of each dinosaur. If I want two different species of dinosaurs to coexist in a single pen, I’ll have to use magic to make sure they both get what they need without annoying each other. I need to heal them when they’re sick, transport them when they’re dead, create replacement dinosaurs, research new ones, excavate fossils, manage the power grid, place bathrooms throughout the park, and so on. It can be overwhelming, especially when Mother Nature is on your side.
If that sounds complicated, just wait until things go wrong. One of the new exhibits in Jurassic World Evolution 2 is for aquatic dinosaurs, and I encountered problems along the way while designing my prehistoric aquarium. My scientists weren’t smart enough to investigate a water dinosaur, and they weren’t skilled enough to dig up the fossils. The dinosaur was too expensive to build, so I had to sit and wait for my park to make more money so that I could afford this exciting new venture. A major storm forced me to evacuate guests and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on repairs just as I reached my cash goal.
However, these agonising setbacks made success all the more sweet. I was satisfied when I’d finally created my perfect lagoon and saw the giant, prehistoric shark leap out of the water to eat a modern shark off a hook. The journey there was obnoxious and frustrating, but the payoff was exactly what I desired. And the visitors to my park adored it.
That is what Jurassic World Evolution 2 excels at. When something goes wrong, everything seems to crumble together, just like in the movies. Unfortunate events always seem to strike when you’re at your most vulnerable, like when all of my original dinosaurs died of old age just as I was saving for the Indominus Rex, the park’s main attraction. It can feel like spinning plates, attracting swarms of families back into the park. But the transformation of my park from a two-star to a five-star was planned. In every store and exhibit, I could see the hard work — my hard work.
You can always build your park in the sandbox mode if you don’t want to see your hard work destroyed or deal with balancing a chequebook. But, in my opinion, that would detract from what I liked so much about Jurassic World Evolution 2. This game demonstrates why every Jurassic Park film since 1993 has failed. Because these dinosaurs are irrational, man. They’re difficult to deal with because they’re from a different era and possibly a different planet. In every film, a small mistake, a bad hire, has destroyed these parks. And if you’re not careful, the same thing could happen to you.
The movies’ message is that you can’t control nature, but Jurassic World Evolution 2 responds, “We’ll let you try anyway.” And I was successful numerous times over the course of nearly 20 hours with this park builder. In Jurassic World Evolution 2, I was able to atone for my past sins by corralling loose dinosaurs and creating one of the most famous movie settings in history. And it allowed me to do things my way while also making me feel as if I’d succeeded where others had failed.