Notable among Jurassic Park Evolution 2’s many new dinosaurs are incredibly well modeled aquatic and flying animals like the Mosasaurus and Pteranodons. Players of the first game will notice quite a few quality of life enhancements, like herbivore dinosaurs that can live off of eating ground cover, and automated ranger stations that will take care of some moment-to-moment tasks unassisted. As in any park management sim, creating the ultimate Jurassic Park will also mean balancing human guest happiness and the desire for more and more impressive animals against the cost of keeping the existing collection secure and alive. As in the first game there is a wide array of staff and support buildings, infrastructure and research facilities that need to be in place for the dinosaurs to survive, thrive and reproduce. Like Planet Zoo, on which a lot of the dinosaur management mechanics are based, players will spend a lot of time deep in the weeds of caring for the health and security of the animals. Let’s be honest, more than a few players just want to build a theme park on the edge of dinosaur Armageddon.
It doesn’t make sense to gate it off, and none of Frontier’s other sims do that. It’s not that I don’t want to play the campaign, Challenge Mode or Chaos Theory scenarios, but if my reason for picking up Jurassic Park Evolution 2 is diving headfirst into the challenge or relaxing time sink of building a park, I should have that opportunity.
It’s more than a little annoying, then, that many of the game’s assets are locked in the Sandbox Mode until the player has uncovered them in one of the other game modes. It could easily be argued that Chaos Theory is the game’s real campaign, and it’s a lot of fun.įor many of us theme park sim fans, Sandbox Mode is where we spend the majority of our time, creating sprawling visions of the ultimate park. Players have considerable freedom to approach the tasks in creative ways but there are restrictions, too, like keeping the general structure of the park already in place. Of course you can revisit the moment in the original film when things were about to go completely to hell, but fans of all the movies will find a lot to love here. Over five scenarios, Chaos Theory takes pivotal moments from each of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films and turns them into assignments, tasking the player to do what the film’s protagonists could not, turning evitable dinosaur disorder into something akin to control. It is probably in the new and incredibly engaging Chaos Theory mode that many players will really connect with the game.