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So, I thought the new Jurassic World movie wasn't too hot, and that put me off getting the Jurassic World: Evolution game a bit (along with the fact most movie spin-off games are reliably stinkers).

I kept hearing decent stuff though, so a few days ago I bought it on a whim, and you know what? It's a really good game!

It's kind of like the Sims mixed with Roller Coaster Tycoon, but if sometimes a 20 ton roller coaster got loose and ate a bunch of sims.

It also has native support for Nvidia Ansel, so I am really enjoying setting up shots and rendering these gigantic 360 degree images.

Who else is enjoying this game?

Haven’t been able to get out to pick this one up but yeah I’ve read a few diffferent reviews and they’ve all been pretty happy with it.
Only problem is the other half wants it on her Xbox profile too, damn woman lol.

Thanks for reminding me about this game. Went out and bought a copy pretty much as soon as I read the OP. And I dug deep enough into the game to have earned five star ratings on Isla Matanceros and Isla Muerta.

To get my major gripe out of the way: the PS4 (at least the non-Pro, launch version) struggles hard with this game. While the controls are fine, frame rate dips are a constant misery. I think it must be the thousands of ant-like tourists crawling all over the attractions. Having the game visually grind like nails on a chalkboard is a terrible reward for running a theme park so well.

Gameplay is very reminiscent of some pay-to- play smart phone app. Or is that just an illusion resulting from how thoroughly mobile games have exploited RTS and sim tropes? In any case, I make the comparison in a favorable light. The game isn't that tough, although there is enough to manage to keep your attention. There is a lot of working on X so you can try to find Y in order to eventually build Z. Whether Z is a new dinosaur or a new kind of building, it's pretty rewarding either way.

I found that dinos sometimes get "stuck" and this will figuratively kill your dinosaur rating and literally kill your animals. They don't look like anything is wrong with them. They just stand there, starving and dehydrating, giving you terrible welfare penalties. Whenever I see a welfare penalty, I always scour my paddocks for "stuck" dinos. The solution I use is tranqing them and having the transport choppers haul them a dozen yards away to the other side of the pen. That snaps 'em out of it and they immediately run for food/water and start recovernig (you can also have some rangers heal them to help things along in dire cases).

 Manchu wrote:
I found that dinos sometimes get "stuck" and this will figuratively kill your dinosaur rating and literally kill your animals. They don't look like anything is wrong with them. They just stand there, starving and dehydrating, giving you terrible welfare penalties. Whenever I see a welfare penalty, I always scour my paddocks for "stuck" dinos. The solution I use is tranqing them and having the transport choppers haul them a dozen yards away to the other side of the pen. That snaps 'em out of it and they immediately run for food/water and start recovernig (you can also have some rangers heal them to help things along in dire cases).

Yeah, while I haven't seen this a lot I've definitely seen it a handful of times. At least once I saw it happen - a raptor went up to a ceratosaur, got visibly and physically stuck for a second while panicking, and then did what you describe. Annoying.

I've unlocked 4 islands - I think I just have Sorna yet. I'm still working on the third island though. I don't want to move on until I am 100% done with the island I am on and the game is fun enough that I am in no rush.

One thing that I would suggest is that you try to avoid making a ton of dinosaurs. The cheaper dinosaurs seem to all like big herds, and you want high variety for that score. So, you wind up with an enormous quantity of dinos. While that does work it also means that later on that island you're going to have a dinosaur die olf old age every few minutes, it seems like, and the game gets tedious instead of fun with constantly removing and incubating your 50 millionth struthie. What you can do instead, which I did on a later island, was to instead get a medium pen, some big carnivores, and feed them smaller dinos with high +attack. You then get a decent combat rating with offsets a bad variety rating.

I had a blast playing it until I beat it and unlocked everything, lasted me about 1-2 weeks or so. After that I haven't touched it since, there is little replayability or anything to keep me playing it. As cool looking as the game is with the animations and graphics and sfx it's not a particularly engaging game. I can only sit there and refill feeders and twiddle my thumbs for so long.

It's still a pretty solid successor to the old operation genesis game. But I prefered the sandbox mode in that game. Luckily JWE can get plenty of post launch dlc content, cause it really needs more things to do in the endgame. One thing that bugged me is part of the fun is starting on the island and the progression, but most of the cool dinos and cool stuff isn't unlocked till later in the game so you don't really get to enjoy the favorite dinos until after the first 3 islands. I'd give this game a 7/10 at best.

I really suffered through the drip-by-drip death of large herbivore herds on Isla Muertos, especially since I had them in a paddock without a Hammond Lab. Yep, I airlifted the entire herd in - and their replacements over time. But wait I'm not a masochist.

You know how you start with that adjoining paddock on Muertos? I immediately bulldozed the side toward the thin end of the island for salvage money to get some cheapo plant eaters in the other side just so I'd be making money rather than losing it while hanging out at that island. Most of my initial money went into building a second research lab, fossil lab, and expedition center so I could start working on new species. I was making about $550K/min on Isla Matanceros, so went back there to work through the new tech and search for dino DNA. When I came back, I started working on redesigning what remained of the starting paddock as a Raptor-torium. I just let my first raptors chew through the veggie munchers I bred, which helped them get their own rating up as you mentioned. The raptors really got the money flowing in and I was building a hotel in no time.

Next up, I wanted a dedicated paddock for big herds and started experimenting with the new ones, with some varied results. Like I said, everything I put in there was actually hatched from the Hammond lab that came with what became my raptor + ankylosaurus exhibit. That exhibit was making good enough money that I started hatching three corys at a time max modded for long life. I ended up only having to replace that population once during the course of my time on Muerta so far. I also botched the science mission the first time (raptor-based snafu, of course) so ended up with two diplodocuses and added all kinds of stuff to flavor - including a sinoceratops that MAGICALLY turned into a triceratops. Life finds a way, I guess.

There is a sandbox mode in JWE - get four stars on Matanceros and unlock Isla Nublar.