Jurassic World Evolution 3 review: "Far from a fossil, this park builder is one you'll keep coming back to, despite its flaws"

Dinosaurs never really go out of fashion. There's something about these titanic animals that stirs the imagination in just about everyone. Despite everything that has happened over the course of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World series, the desire to visit such a park is pervasive in people of my generation. It should come as no surprise, then, that creating your own dinosaur theme park in Jurassic World Evolution 3 is, at its best, an extremely engaging experience.

Over the course of the game's campaign, you'll create theme parks near Vegas, in the snowy Dolomites, on the verdant shores of the Azores, and in several other locations. Each comes with its own set of criteria to meet if you want to make a truly fantastic park. The park near Las Vegas, for example, is focused on flying dinosaurs, while in Indonesia, you'll need to cope with dino disease outbreaks that threaten to capsize your business. While there will be quite a bit of crossover between your parks, they never threaten to converge, carcinisation-like, into carbon copies of the same location.

The game gives you some freebie dinosaurs to get you started with your parks, but to get more, you need to research dig sites and send your scientists out to dig them up. Then, it's time to bring them back, extracting DNA from the fossils, synthesizing dinosaurs from a rogues gallery of crowd pleasers and more obscure species, and then creating the conditions for them to breed naturally. It's involved, but that's fine – bringing dinosaurs back from the dead should be. You're also able to create hybrid dinosaurs, or tweak the dinosaurs' genes in a somewhat eugenicist way to make them more sociable, fertile, and so on. In addition to this, your scientists will also need to research various techs that make your park better. These range from the understandable, like new gene modifications, to busywork, like researching wider paths. Now, I don't have a PhD, but I'm pretty sure widening a walkway doesn't require the combined knowledge of the cream of the scientific community.

What do we want? Extinction! When do we want it? Now!

Opposing your efforts to play God is a group called Extinction Now, who argue, not entirely unreasonably, that dinosaurs should stay extinct. Their methods include protests and sabotage, which can be annoying, but didn't represent too much of a stumbling block during my campaign, as I was able to tranquilise any escaped fauna and stop it from seeing the teeming guests as a kind of ambulatory buffet, with the help of some emergency shelters I'd plonked down earlier. They aren't the sole cause of problems, though – storms can periodically smash into your parks, which can also wreak havoc.

I wish that I could say that Jurassic World Evolution 3 is always a smooth experience. The core gameplay loop is built around keeping both your guests and your recently revived relics of the past thriving, and that's tough when pathfinding bugs prevent your staff from actually getting where they need to be (even, so far, after a day one patch).

This was particularly painful for me on the Maltese map, which is all scorched rocks and sandy expanses. I had built a monorail to serenely glide my guests around the park, but my staff refused to walk to their workstations to activate it – only able to access them if I personally drove them there. This will likely be fixed eventually, but it put me in the mindset of having to babysit my employees through the simplest tasks so they don't get caught out when I'm not watching.

Beyond bugs, the power system is incredibly finicky, requiring you to place substations that link back up to the main power station for the park. Each one has a coverage area that is just slightly too small, so you'll end up with unsightly substations all over your park. The UI is sometimes hard to parse, too, and it's not always immediately obvious how to solve problems that present themselves. I still don't know what 'building constraints' are, either; the phrase that the game used, with alarming regularity, to slap my hand while attempting to put down some new amenities in clearly open spaces. There also doesn't appear to be any way to lay bridges across water, so you'll need to dig into the terrain tools to build paths across even small ditches.

Isla New-Blar

Yet I kept playing it, and not just for the review, either. After a couple of rounds of Battlefield 6 in my off-hours, I found myself returning to Jurassic World Evolution 3 as a way to chill out. It's almost hypnotic, watching your dinosaurs gambol around, interacting with their environment and each other. Credit to the animators who worked on them – watching them never felt like it got dull, and I couldn't help but watch every dinosaur's first moments. I wish the guests had anything like as much charisma – an order as tall as a Brachiosaurus, I know – they're effectively just mannequins that make their way around your park and seemed (at least in my game) almost dangerously unperturbed by storms. More than once, they were sitting outside a souvenir shop in T-shirts while snow was hitting them with the force of a category 5 hurricane.

You can, thankfully, research techs to help you deal with storms and escaped dinosaurs alike, which goes some way towards keeping your park in good order. If anything, it's a little too easy to keep things ticking over nicely, and will likely make you wonder what the staff at Isla Nublar were doing the whole time.

Alongside the campaign, there is a challenge mode and a sandbox mode. I imagine that most of my time in this game will, eventually, be spent in the sandbox, just as I did with Zoo Tycoon back in the day. In the sandbox mode, you can play across the campaign maps, legacy maps, or generate a brand new island, which you can then tweak to add and remove trees, mountains, and other geographical features. Challenges take place on campaign maps and allow you to unlock props that you can place in your parks – nice, but totally inessential.

It's a strong game, and one that is, a lot of the time, a great deal of fun to play. Bugs, busywork and a shallow difficulty curve aside, it's a game that you'll likely keep coming back to, and one whose charm can overpower most of its issues, making it ideal for anyone with dino fever who wants to party like it's 99 million years BC.

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