If the video game canon was a library, deep within the section dedicated to cult games that never quite made the leap to classic, beside dusty games mostly forgotten and full of scrawled notes in the margins left by the aspiring few who had more passion than a sense of tempered craft, would sit Jurassic Park Operation Genesis. JPOG was a theme park simulator released in 2003, and I, as well as a handful of others, picked it up almost immediately. The idea of running your own Jurassic Park was something of a dream of mine ever since I saw the original film when I was, honestly, far too young to be watching it. Zoo Tycoon, another cult game but one that may have breached some sort of "cult classic" status at this point (and one in outdated limbo as the game is notoriously difficult to run on modern machines) had an expansion that allowed for dinosaurs in your park. To date, I would still say that that expansion is probably the best overall game that is closest to the Jurassic Park ethos, even if it isn't the most fun to play. But it still wasn't Jurassic Park, it didn't have similar iconic designs, such as the T-Rex's overbite, nor did it have that style so unique to the franchise. JPOG, then, felt like a promise finally kept, one of interacting with this excellent idea proposed by the films but always adjacent to the games world without ever being fully realized.
It is controversial to say, but I do not think that Jurassic Park Operation Genesis comes particularly close to "cult classic" status. As much as I love it, the game was heavily flawed, and despite an absurdly committed mod scene for the age and lack of popularity of the game, it remains flawed even with a slew of tweaks. The issue with JPOG is that, at its core, it was a poor park simulator. Visitors could be buggy with their satisfaction levels, you were given extreme limitations on what can be placed in your park and how many (the latter of which, admittedly, could be modded out), and the game's midpoint always resulted in you waiting for things to happen rather than engaging with any of its systems. A simulator of this type, where you are overlooking a theme park, a city, or some other corporate entity with guests or consumers, has to balance out the business with the creative. The business has to be the conflict, of balancing profits and expenditures with safety measures, with cleanliness, and with visitor satisfaction so you can then use the tools to create something fun and unique. The way in which you balance these two is usually where the fun comes from. Games such as City Skylines, Roller Coaster Tycoon, or Sim City wouldn't be nearly as great as they are without deftly riding this razors edge between creativity and work. Holding together these complex systems and utilizing their successes for your own gain is the fun. For JPOG, the systems are all easily gamed or ignored, and getting to a 5-star rating for your park is a matter of simple, unavoidable growth rather than careful planning. Planning, outside of where you put your dinosaur pens and where you lay your paths, is virtually nonexistent. There are so few things to place that you cannot truly get creative with it. What JPOG did well, however, was create a game that truly felt like it was within the Jurassic Park franchise. It was what it said it was, to a degree, and the designs were mostly correct to at least one of the films' dinosaur depictions (except: what the fuck is with these raptors?).
The absurd legendary status of Jurassic Park Operation Genesis hangs over everything in Jurassic World Evolution. In the most literal sense, JWE is JPOG's successor. The primary loop to just about everything is the same. Both games require you to hire expeditions to dig up dinosaur bones for you to research their genome. Over 50% genome means they are viable to clone, but the lower the genome the greater the chance that the incubation process will fail. Getting as a high a genome as possible both increases the chance of a successful incubation and increases the lifespan of your dinosaurs. Both games likewise have viewing platforms, fence vents for viewing, and an in-paddock ride that lets you get close to the dinosaurs. You also get to take pictures of the dinosaurs for some extra cash, and can fly a helicopter to knock dinos out with a tranquilizer dart. You can say this all sounds pretty basic, but virtually none of this is shown in the films, and so is unique to the "park sim" side of the Jurassic Park canon. The real difference between the games comes from the mission system and the park layout.
One of the most lauded aspects of Operation Genesis by fans was its generated island. Each game of JPOG was essentially a sandbox game, where your only goal was to get a 5-star rating on your park. It felt like a skirmish, so when it came to choosing where you were making your park, it made sense to give you control over your island as well. JWE has come under considerable criticism for not allowing generated park maps, rather requiring you to choose one of their six or so (depending on DLC) parks and working within those confines. As nice as it would be to somewhat generate my own park, JPOG's choice to do so really added very little. You could choose how big your island was, which was never all that big in the first place (and certainly not as big as the biggest park in JWE), and you could choose the amount of mountain terrain or rivers were present, which would either hinder your development or provide easy water for your dinos. The generation in JPOG was simple at best, and hardly even counts as a feature when you measure what little difference it made to your parks. All that said, I don't necessarily like how this was executed in JWE.
Evolution has several park layouts, and nearly every one of them has choke points where a path can be placed, but little else. Often times, the maps feel like thin corridors with pockets of open land branching off like buds on the stalk of a plant. The game is broadcasting to you where you should put your dino pens, but this is really only a suggestion. One creative alternative I've found is eliminating the paths in these choke points and instead making them pens themselves. You can use a monorail to traverse over them, and essentially have pockets of visitor areas as well as dinosaur pens. This is pretty much telegraphed to you on the Isla Sorna map, which consists of three large pockets connected by three extremely narrow choke points in a circle. There are multiple ways you could go about laying out this park if you so wanted, but by far the easiest is to create a little visitor area in each of the pockets, and tie them together with a monorail. The restrictions given to you, despite looking like park layout has been decided for you, do actually have quite a bit of flexibility to them so long as you remain creative with your execution, and so long as you largely ignore most of what the game is telegraphing to you with its pre-laid paths at an island's start. All of this said, several of the parks are still far too small for use. The infamous Isla Pena is a considerable challenge, and by far the hardest in the game. It is absolutely tiny, giving you extreme limitations in how you can approach it. The island works best in the campaign, as a way of forcing you to consider some aspects of the game you may have otherwise ignored until now, such as dinosaur rating (which has to do with not only the species, but also the number of dinosaurs it has killed and its genetic modifications, which we will get to shortly). It makes you pay attention to the systems you've learned about thus far in a way in which you must contend with them now, or otherwise fail. This would be all great if it weren't for the fact this island also has the worst storms of any island, making it extremely dangerous as storms usually set aggressive animals, such as the Velociraptor, into a tizzy where it breaks your fences and hunts down guests. The game has a limited choice of park layouts as it is, and this one only really has one use as there is virtually no reason to come back to it after the campaign except for a challenge that, honestly, you already accomplished anyway. The other smaller parks likewise limit creativity after a spell, and having a generatible map would go a long way in remedying this limitation.
JWE does one thing particularly right and far better than in JPOG, and that is the dinosaurs themselves. All of the dinosaurs look just like they do in the movies, and their presentation is damn near perfect. Their movements and sounds all parse correctly, and watching a T-Rex's leg muscles jiggle as it stomps around looking for food is not only impressive in its detail, but intimidating. When creating these dinosaurs, you are given the option to modify their genome for varying effects. This can be as simple as modifying their color pallet (which was a fun way to tell the difference between my Rexes on Isla Sorna), or as complex as modifying their lifespan, health, and attack stats. Making highly aggressive dinosaurs will, obviously, make them more likely to break out or kill other dinosaurs in their pen. Dinosaurs with a storied history, however, will also attract more guests and increase your dinosaur rating, so there is some incentive to have a chaotic monster so long as you can justify the labor needed to keep it in check. Modifying the genome, however, comes at the cost of lowering its incubation success rate. This is a great risk and reward, as you could be blowing $2mil on a T-Rex that might just die before it matures, but on the other hand could be a powerful attraction. I didn't play around with this feature much until I got to Isla Sorna, where my dinosaurs were essentially free to roam around wherever they pleased, and having a big bad dinosaur became a lot more fun.
Dinosaurs aren't just attractions, however. There are basic maintenance chores such as refilling their feeders or curing them of diseases, but by far the most "management" this game gets is in taking care of the dinosaurs' happiness. Each dinosaur has a different threshold of how many trees, how much grass, and how many other dinosaurs it wants in its enclosures. I can't be totally sure, but based on my experiments on Isla Sorna, it seemed that the dinosaur threshold had more to do with their proximity to these things than what was exclusively locked in with them. Dinosaurs would feel there were too many trees in a wooded area of the map, but once they walked over to the plains they were fine. Likewise with the social breeds, such as Velociraptor, who would be happy in proximity with their pack, but once they strayed too far would become agitated. Managing their happiness, and learning which dinosaurs would mix (big carnivores could mix with long-necked herbivores, for instance, as could anything big with any small carnivore, except maybe the T-Rex and the Indominous Rex) was a great deal of fun going through the campaign and sandbox modes.
The same cannot be said, however, for the mission system. In JPOG, you got emails telling you of dissatisfaction so you could better tailor your park to increase its rating, or otherwise tell you when something horrible was breaking out. JWE retains the warnings, but instead of emails you will often receive missions. There are three departments to your park: the entertainment division, the scientific division, and the security division. Each will vie for your attention, and ask you to accomplish tasks for them for a hefty reward. If you let one of their reputations drop below a certain threshold, they will attempt to sabotage your park, usually by turning off one or more of your power systems, which can be easily fixed (although one sabotage, where all the gates to all of your pens open at once, is by far and away the most destructive). From a gameplay standpoint, the point is to encourage good practices when you aren't meeting basic needs for your park (such as having good shelter coverage or applying upgrades to your ranger station or ACU), and then rewarding you with cash to give you an extra leg up once you've done so. The issue here comes in three parts.
Firstly, the missions are almost always trite. They are condescending to you if you know what you are doing, and relieving consequences to those who do not. The former I can mostly deal with, as I understand you need to get new players up to speed, and it did get me to realize a few mechanics I wasn't venturing to explore on my own. The latter, however, becomes intrusive if you know what you are doing. The issue comes mostly from the hefty money reward you get for accomplishing simple tasks. It is nearly impossible to lose money at this game, making the business side of this management sim essentially moot. When first starting a park, it is potentially possible for you to have lost enough money you can't come back from it, such as incubating a T-Rex as your first dinosaur but then having the incubation fail before putting in anything that could net you money. But most fuck ups result in you having to wait a long time until you can place something like a restaurant or a new dinosaur attraction in order to increase profits. Missions, for all they do fail at, at the very least always require you to spend money, so having a certain nest egg or a consistently viable stream of income is required to take advantage of them. Not being in this position, however, is a rarity. It was incredibly easy to be in the tens-of-millions of dollars before hitting 3-stars, essentially making the 5-star rating either a waiting game or a game of Tetris, as I tried to fit all of my visitor amenities together in such a small space.
Secondly, the missions are given by the heads of their individual departments, and they are all atrocious. They bemoan the importance of these contracts, the greatness of the money you will receive ("You'd be insane to turn this down!"), and how challenging accomplishing them was for you, when in reality all you had to do was place something down you'd forgotten because it was making no impact on the millions upon millions you were accruing. The mission heads will act equal parts smug as they are amazed, and the whole presentation is incredibly hokey. If you were looking for a realistic sim, you are sincerely out of luck as any amount of immersion you could get from this game is immediately dashed once anyone starts talking. They aren't the only ones who do, either. Jeff Goldblum returns as Dr. Ian Malcolm, but the writing is an extreme caricature. Nevermind the fact that his return to Jurassic Park, let alone his employment is itself ridiculous, the fact all he does is talk down about the different division heads makes his inclusion virtually useless outside of being able to claim on advertisements that he is indeed in the game. If you buy the Return to Jurassic Park DLC, this issue is compounded as all the regulars from the original Jurassic Park such as Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (with horrible impressions as their voices) try desperately to justify why they would ever think of working for the traumatizing park in the first place. Underneath all of these people is the lawyer character whose name I forget. He oversees Jurassic World, and is apparently your boss, and acts as goofily ignorant as much as he talks about money, which is to say all the time. The game has a gross pro-capitalist bend to it, something that all sims of this nature technically do, but usually through an admiration of the systems in place and how to utilize them, not usually in the deification of money. I consider all of this to be a sincere criticism, but one with the caveat that it's all hokey. It isn't meant to be serious, but it feels detrimental to my immersion nonetheless.
Thirdly but certainly not least so, is that the missions themselves often ask you to do things that are so apparently out of character, that it increases the hokey-ness mentioned above. The security division, in particular, is the worst at this. At least once he asks you to release a dinosaur into the park to see how well you handle a disaster. From a gameplay standpoint, okay this makes sense. I'm learning how to re-contain a dinosaur that has escaped its enclosure, but from an immersive standpoint it is beyond ridiculous. The things missions ask you to do has little if any positive contribution to a consistent ludonarritive, rather chipping away from it at every popup that rudely interrupts whatever task you are on at the time. This becomes particularly annoying as the game does not feature an explicit pause button. Time is consistent throughout, no speeding up or slowing down or stopping entirely to better make decisions. You react now, or you wait until you can. This isn't all that crazy for a sim game, but it is always something that annoys me. The game will occasionally pause the action if, for example, one of your big five missions pops up (one for each department on each of the five main islands), but that is all you get. These five missions are generally multi-step and more difficult to accomplish, and usually gate some particularly useful unlock.
The differences between Jurassic Park Operation Genesis and Jurassic World Evolution are almost along the avenues of taste rather than quality. If I had to pick one, Jurassic World would probably win for its superior look and more involved interaction with dinosaurs. Jurassic World Evolution is more or less a broken sim, one sure to be fun to anyone who likes the movie(s) as much as I do, but for those not interested in the subject matter it may be a shallow bore full of annoyances and little creative output. The recent release of Planet Zoo by the same developer looks to be far more the management sim than this is, and it may be until that game acquires a big enough modding community before the true blue sim of my dreams becomes a reality. Until then, I'm happy enough with my little box of fleas, imagining the sim that could have been.
6.5
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