GameCentral gets a hands-off demonstration of the next Jurassic World Evolution, which is shaping up to be the most in-depth dinosaur sim yet.
The Jurassic Park franchise might be past its glory years in terms of enjoyable blockbuster movies, but it’s a different story in video games. Jurassic Park: Survival from Saber Interactive looks pretty promising based on its first trailer, and in 2021 we saw the best interactive adaptation of the series to date in Jurassic World Evolution 2.
Developed by Frontier, the sequel refined and expanded on the original dinosaur park management sim from 2018, with plenty of nods to the movies. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s essentially RollerCoaster Tycoon spun through a Jurassic Park lens, where you build a park, manage the happiness of both dinosaurs and guests, and try to avoid causing a velociraptor outbreak in the middle of piling up profits.
As revealed earlier this week, Frontier is developing another sequel which will launch across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on October 21. Jurassic World Evolution 2 had some drawbacks, most notably in its thin campaign mode, but the improvements in this third entry are more robust and widespread than you might expect.
In a hands-off preview session, Frontier debuted several new features in Jurassic World Evolution 3. The biggest, at least on the adorable scale, is the addition of baby dinosaurs. You can breed these through nests, either by creating a comfortable environment for your adult dinosaurs and hoping for the best or, if you’re too impatient to wait for natural horniness to strike, setting up a breeding programme led by some dork scientists.
On the surface, this might seem like a cutesy marketing ploy to hook those susceptible to the sight of a baby Triceratops. However, mechanically, it comes with some surprising depth. There’s an entire system based around passing down traits of dinosaurs to their offspring, which you can modify and dictate via the breeding programme route. Each dinosaur also has a fertility scale, which naturally fluctuates with age, so you have to strategise when is the best time to endorse dino bonking season.
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The benefits of fostering baby dinosaurs will have a long-term impact on your park too. If you can maintain a family lineage of dinosaurs within the park, this will lead to extra bonuses and profits as a valued attraction among guests. In a neat additional detail, you’ll have to adapt your enclosure around them too. In the preview, the example highlighted was a baby long-necked Sauropod, which might require a raised platform to munch leaves off the high trees like its parents.
Beyond babies, the other striking improvement is the maps themselves. There’s a stronger global focus, with Japan and China among the locations, alongside destinations across Europe and the US. The maps have a greater sense of verticality too, with rock formations and sloping water features you can build around, which all look impressively detailed.
This plays into the expanded customisation tools for creating parks. At the brush of a cursor, you can alter the terrain on the fly, whether carving out canyons, implementing waterfalls and having the water trickle down sandy slopes, or applying a rocky texture to create an organic quality around your enclosures. It looks intuitively designed, easy to execute, and makes creating actual parks look far more enticing and versatile overall.
In general, Jurassic World Evolution 3 is trying to become a stronger creative sandbox you’ll want to mess around with. You can now design buildings right down to the specific angles of tiles, colours, and blocks, or alter presets with personal flourishes, like a T-Rex skeleton looming over the doorway or themes inspired by the movies. Better yet, these creations can be shared with others through the Frontier Workshop, so if you’re lazy or creatively stunted, you can apply the designs of others into your park or visit other people’s for inspiration.
If you’re more into the chaos management side, Frontier teased a new campaign, although it didn’t show any footage from it. However, the story will take place after the last film, Jurassic World Dominion, and will task you with trying to integrate dinosaurs at various maps around the world, under the guidance of Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm. The campaigns in previous games have been little more than a glorified tutorial, but this sounds like it will be more substantial in scope.
The developers at Frontier concluded the preview with a spinosaurus swimming out into a bed of water, created using the expanded terrain tools. The confirmation of semi-aquatic dinosaurs might be a small reveal to outsiders, but it’s representative of what’s promised with Jurassic World Evolution 3 – a sequel where every addition deepens the greater whole. We’ll have to play it ourselves to see how the new aspects come together, but based on this early look, this is easily the most promising reason to stay invested in Jurassic Park.
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