Jurassic World Evolution 2 (2021)

Playtime: 4,25 hours

Played: 2025

Intro

JWE2 is a theme park/zoo sim in which you build a prison for dinosaurs and then parade them around for money.

The Good

• Probably the best dino zoo game.
• No endless shitty "missions" like in JWE1.
• Sandbox mode lets you disable anything you don't want to deal with.
• Decent amount of dino's.
• Graham Vick's voice acting really stands out.

The Bad

• Chrisp Rat didn't want to do VA (unlike Goldblum, Howard and Wong) and his replacement is distracting in a bad way.
• Goldblum phoned it in. Maybe literally, i thought it was a fake too.
• The tutorial doesn't indicate you have to fire a scientist to hire a new one in the second mission. I just couldn't believe that was the solution.
• Pretty much all systems and aspects are basic to very basic.
• Medical research uses the logistics stat instead of the medical stat? Huh?
• For some insane reason you can only build short stretches of path or fencing. Just... why?
• You can't take a screenshot while looking from an observation post.
• The intro is truly terrible and i barely got what it was about despite having seen JP 1-3 and JW 1-2.

The Ugly

If you didn't get the title, Jenny Nicholson is a YouTuber who paid thousands of dollars to stay at the now-dead Star Wars Hotel. During the dinner music performance she couldn't see the stage because of a pole.

JWE2 has a similar problem. You can't walk around freely (AFAIK) and even inside observation posts you are glued to the ground. For me the whole point of playing a game with dinosaurs is looking at cool dinosaurs. JWE2 barely lets you do that. Seriously, they even put a fucking pole at eye height in this post:

Why?!?!

Conclusion

JWE2 is definitely a huge improvement over the first game but it lacks the depth a theme park sim player probably wants while not allowing you to properly look at dino's like a casual player might want. Also, they should've just changed Pratt's character. His replacement just sounds too different and it's rather annoying.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 certainly has a fitting title, because it's exactly that - a true evolution. The campaign might be a little on the short side, performance problems are unfortunate, and only having a handful of the movie actors reprise their roles can feel a little jarring (the Chris Pratt soundalike is kind of terrible). But rustling beyond the foliage of these superficial issues is a simulation game with the kind of depth and nuance that the original game promised but never really delivered.

There's plenty to try out across its smattering of modes, with everything you unlock during regular play feeding back into the Sandbox mode, giving you even more options to mess around with there without limits. Certainly one of the better games of its ilk, especially on console, and while it can still get a little intense by genre standards, it probably wouldn't be a very good Jurassic Park game if it didn't.