Jurassic World Evolution 3

PlayStation 5 review

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is the third entry in the Evolution franchise created by Frontier Developments who previously made the Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo franchises.

Evolution 3 is a zoo building game that instead of traditional animals has the player bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life through fossils. The game sees the player tasked with saving failing parks across the globe with the lingering fear of a terrorist group plotting to make the dinosaurs permanently extinct once and for all.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S and PC with this review being written using the PlayStation 5 version on a base PlayStation 5 not Pro.

Pros:

Graphics.

Evolution 3 has 87 unique Dinosaurs in the base game spread across Herbivores, Carnivores and Piscivores who inhabit land, sea, and air enclosures.

Compared to the previous game there were 84 Dinosaurs in Evolution 2, so a small increase with Evolution 3 with the majority of species returning from Evolution 2 with only a handful missing at launch. However, Frontier has said on social media platforms that they will be introducing the missing species from Evolution 2 for free over time.

All the Dinosaurs have had a graphical overhaul with the switch to PlayStation 5 with new character models that have increased textures and visuals in addition to the new lighting engine casting darker and more realistic shadows on each Dinosaur.

The big brand-new change to this game is the introduction of breeding to the franchise, so every Dinosaur now needs a juvenile form that hatches from eggs in the exhibit, and they all look adorable and have fun interactions with their parents in the pen.

This is along with each exhibit needing to be changed with the arrival of juveniles since baby sauropods cannot reach tall trees for food, so the player needs to adapt and include plants and fruits near the floor for these babies to reach to grow up and mature into adults.

Content.

Campaign has 10 maps; Challenge mode has 9 and Sandbox has 8 returning maps from prior games and all campaign maps along with a random island generator to make your experience completely unique.

Campaign mode now has a full World Map so players can explore the story in a non-linear fashion by starting a particular story level then leaving as the plot progresses to then return to 5* it later on once the player unlocks more Dinosaurs and research. This is more similar to the Chaos Theory mode of Evolution 2 that expanded on the shorter campaign length of the campaign in that game.

Challenge mode is an actual challenge on Jurassic difficulty that players will enjoy sinking their teeth into, like the first challenge “Kauai Camerawork” is basically a Jurassic World version of Pokémon Snap under a very strict time limit for the best clear reward of 7 minutes I did in 6 minutes 30 seconds to spare.

The rest of the 8 challenges all last over two hours each on or more on Jurassic difficulty, so players are not out of directed content after finishing the campaign. Then if players want to get the Platinum trophy, then these will be very replayable with their strict time limit to beat the par time for each level.

The returning maps all have a new visual overhaul using assets from Evolution 3, with the obvious example being the upgraded water physicals for waterfalls and rock formations. The biggest change is in the Canada map that is now permanently covered in snow instead of brown soil and dirt, so now there is less customisation with the terrain in the Evolution 3 version due to the snow covering the terrain compared to Evolution 2.

Music.

John Williams music is iconic, and Evolution 3 plays it pretty often during the game like on the main menu screen, when you finish all objectives in a park and when the player reaches 5 stars on each park.

The rest of the soundtrack is also great even if it cannot match the legendary work of John Williams work for the films and still found it very enjoyable and atmospheric while playing each different biome and region.

Expanded Biomes.

New to Evolution 3 is the world map being expanded to Asia for the campaign and custom levels featuring Chain, Japan, and Indonesia.

Foliage brushes now for creating exhibits instead of placing everything manually and an expanded paintbrush set for the terrain with more options.

There is a new lighting overhaul compared to previous games which allows the dinosaurs to have a more natural look like in the real world with shadows that match more to each Dinosaur’s muscle and feathers that add depth to each animal for immersion.

Terrain tools also got an overhaul in Evolution 3, with players able to change the environment in much greater ways with high cliffs, gentle slopes, caves, automatic waterfalls, and plunge pools.

Evolution Workshop.

This is the same Workshop mechanic used in Planet Coaster and other games by Frontier that allows players to create custom blueprints for buildings and scenery to upload for other players to download into their own parks.

This time it is cross platform, so console players like myself on PlayStation 5 could use creations from PC players and import them into my sandbox mode park on PlayStation 5 with no issues at a simple download.

Modular buildings.

A really fun mechanic brought forward to this game are Modular buildings. This adds a lot to creativity to Evolution 3 incredibly well allowing players to create iconic buildings from the films on top of the Jurassic Park skins for vehicles already in the game.

This is expanded upon with the Evolution Workshop in Evolution 3 where players can download the creations of other players and see how much they can push the Modular Building mechanic.

Cons:

Performance.

Evolution 3 is limited to 30fps on base PlayStation 5 models and in my experience, it would frequently drop below this threshold.

This is most easily seen on more complex parks that fill over 60% of the complexity meter but also on maps that have constant particle effects like Italy and China. As these reduce the frame rate constantly due to rendering it over the entire map at all times.

There are no Quality or Performance mode toggles still in these games that would really help since players can drive ATVs quickly in first person or try to tranquillise Dinosaurs from helicopters that would be much more enjoyable at 60fps compared to 30fps.

Crashes.

Evolution 3 is a lot less optimised for consoles compared to prior games as in my play through I had six game crashes across my entire time playing so far.

These crashes ranged from simple soft locks where after places buildings or objects on very full parks then the game would lock up, and I would not be able to access any of the menu’s or exit the game.

Other times the game would close completely and return back to the PlayStation 5 home screen, and this happened the most frequently especially on the challenge levels instead of the campaign or sandbox mode.

The last type of crash I encountered was a complete system fail when the PlayStation 5 rebooted itself in repair mode to repair the system storage. This happened in the Italy level near the end of the game so if this happens do not panic as the PlayStation was fine after the automatic repair finished.

Plotline.

The story in Evolution 3 was a major focus in the marketing for the game with the antagonists being Extinction Now a group made for the marketing of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom back in 2018 with the Twitter account still being up to this day.

However, they are not very effective antagonists in the story considering they are eco terrorists that want the extinction of all the revived Dinosaurs and humanity to survive.

This is in stark contrast to their role in game where they pop up once or twice per each level of the campaign to only annoy the player then disappear every time. With their actions leading to turn off the power to the park to release the dinosaurs, breaking equipment or stealing Dinosaur eggs occasionally.

Due to this it leads to more people dying due to Dinosaurs escaping and eating people and that goes against Extinct Now’s only goal of preserving human life leading to a very confusing story until the group is swept under the rug at the very end of the story in an unsatisfactory manner.

Story cameos.

Unlike the last game there are very few returning movie characters with only Jeff Goldblum making an appearance during the story mode.

In Evolution 2 we had the return of Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) characters to come back and fill in some of the time gap after Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom and later, we saw some of the Dominion cast show up in the “Dominion Biosyn Expansion” DLC.

This is in contrast to Evolution 3 which now takes place after Jurassic World Dominion, so Dinosaurs are loose around the planet and Biosyn has fallen from relevance. Yet we do not see any other characters return except Ian Malcolm to help explain the aftermath or what the characters are up to now in the interim.

NPC A.I.

While a majority of the time the A.I for Staff, Guests and Dinosaurs is competent there were a lot of times when the A.I would break and they would get stuck either on a path or in terrain.

The pathfinding for the maintenance ATV, Ranger Jeeps and Medical trucks would get stuck on the corner of buildings or the pathfinding would have them stuck in the middle of two objectives with the vehicle unable to make a decision between either and so will error out refusing to move to one or other.

This led to several times per map when I would have to take manual control of each vehicle to get them unstuck and to go about their duties until getting stuck again.

A good solution for this would be to not only assign tasks but creating a pathfinding option to map out the route for each vehicle to take as they go through their automatic checklist of tasks.

Disease Outbreaks.

A minor pet peeve going through the campaign was trying to finish all the research in the game and this requires creating vaccines and countermeasures for several diseases.

However, they are all completely random if they will appear or not and after finishing all of the game and the majority of the trophies, I still had several diseases yet to make an appearance in any of the parks.

Considering natural disasters and weather affects play a large role in this game there should be an outbreak disaster where feeders get automatically infected or these diseases manifest in the dinosaurs to ramp up the challenge.

As otherwise the Paleo-Medial unit barely gets any usage during my play through, and I usually sell it to save running costs in my parks.

Tour ride limitations.

While players have the vehicle tours over land, air, and shallow water there are still no vehicle tour options for aviaries, deep water, or lagoons.

This seems like an oversight as Frontier could edit the behaviour of the dinosaurs to not interact with guests on the Cretaceous Cruise kayak tour or the Balloon Tour to allow guests to use these tours through water exhibits or aviaries.

While not a tour ride, another limitation is that guests will not walk on bridges over water, so this stops the player setting up viewing platforms for guests.

Sandbox and Island Generator.

While a fantastic inclusion it feels very limited at launch with only the one biome available to use with the Tropical biome and being locked out of any other.

Players also cannot edit the beaches of the islands and instead are blocked off from them and can only edit the mainland of each island.

Other minor issues with Sandbox mode are that players can only place one arrival point for each park now compared to prior games. This limits how guests enter the parks and the distribution of crowds and density due to being funnelled through the main entrance.

Dinosaur behaviour.

After all these sequels there is still no way for Sauropods to fight back in a fight against a carnivore or a potential rival for a mate.

In fights between two Dinosaurs there still needs to be an animation overhaul as the two animals still circle each other and take turns fighting each other making it feel very static instead of dynamic like actual animals fighting.

There are also no enrichment items for the exhibits like there were in Planet Zoo, so all the dinosaur behaviour feels more limited to socialising, drinking, or eating.

Quality of life updates.

These are small issues that I found to be hindering my play through that could easily be rectified with patches.

As with the introduction of breeding and juvenile Dinosaurs it makes no sense how ay the hatchery players can only release adult Dinosaurs instead of releasing them early as juveniles or adolescents.

The menus are very slow to navigate through on console. This is especially apparent when editing the environments and trying to use the thumb stick to scroll through the scenery options with rocks being near the bottom.

Players also cannot filter by biome for scenery parts, as this would help speed up decorating a park that only uses one particular biome theme and as such there also needs to be a “Favourites” tab like in Planet Coaster to quickly reselect an object to place more of it in the environment. As such it is difficult to custom tailor and exhibit with rock formations when the player needs to navigate through several menus to reselect a particular rock.

Even though Evolution 3 is another theme park builder by Frontier Development and the third game in this subseries alone they still have not brought over the particle effect generators like fireworks, fire, fog, or sparks that are in the Planet Coaster games.

Players also cannot sell Dinosaurs only release them to the wild. This costs the player even more money to do so and makes it more difficult to get out of a debt spiral if the player has to deal with problematic Dinosaurs with bad traits causing issues in the exhibit. So even though players can buy Dinosaurs on the Marketplace they cannot sell them on it.

There is no lethal option to deal with Dinosaurs only tranquillisers to knock them unconscious or stimulants to wake them back up and this makes it more difficult to get rid of problematic Dinosaurs since they cannot be sold on the marketplace.

So, players have to spend even more money rehoming them in the wild or place them in an isolated space on the park far from anyone else until the dinosaur passes away if the player cannot afford to increase their living standards to avoid breakouts or fights.

Players still cannot stack aviaries on top of each other, so there is not a lot of verticality in the exhibit for flying Dinosaurs instead they have to spread out wide for the area requirements. Also, cannot Terraform the land in the bottom of the aviary compared to the other exhibits.

Conclusion:

A good step forward in the franchise but only feels like an iterative upgrade over Evolution 2 and not enough to justify full sequel status instead of an expansion with the breeding mechanic.

I would recommend players keep playing Evolution 2 and wait until a sale for Evolution 3 instead of buying it at full price.

This is due to Evolution 2 still having more Dinosaurs in total after all the DLC and free updates compared to the launch roster of Evolution 3.

Score: 8.0